There’s a remarkable tendency nowadays for climate alarmists, a category that includes much of the press, to regard climate change as so conclusively settled that checking actual facts is for losers. In response to a CNN piece shrilling “Extreme weather caused by climate change is raising food prices worldwide, study says” Ryan Maue posted “Recent droughts or heat waves are not unprecedented. In 1877, 4% of the Earth’s population died due to a famine induced by worst drought in past 250-years, or longer.” But the journalist never checked. And Chris Martz just fired back at some alarmist psychologist asking “Why do farmers keep voting for a party that is determined to ignore climate change?” with… a chart of global crop yields rising steadily and spectacularly. Not in response to the other guy’s data, because he had none. Just an assumption and an attitude.

Seriously. The food price piece, also peddled by MSN, concerned a “study led by Maximillian Kotz of the Barcelona Supercomputer Center.” Not of the Barcelona Paleoclimate Actual Data Centre. There isn’t one of those. And that story insisted that:

“The cost of a wide range of goods – from vegetables in California to coffee in Brazil – saw dramatic spikes in recent years due to weather conditions that were ‘so extreme they exceeded all historical precedent prior to 2020,’ according to the study”.

To its credit, the story did link to the study. Which frankly reads more like a six-page manifesto than a piece of research right down to women and children hardest hit. Especially as, insofar as we could determined, its data only go back to 1901. It’s not that they disagree with us about conditions before 1901. It’s that they weren’t remotely interested in looking at them. But how can you brush aside historical precedent in your paper without at least looking at it?

We don’t really like the term “ideological” to describe people who are not persuaded by what we consider the obviously relevant facts. The main test of “ideology” seems to be that someone insists on holding their opinion even after hearing yours. But at the same time we do think that people who have gone beyond facts might want to come back for some. For instance, Reuters “Sustainable Switch” just emailed, as if it were self-evidently compelling, that:

“Thousands of people around the world have been dealing with extreme weather this week, from heat waves and wildfires in Turkey and Cyprus to heavy rains and storms in Vietnam, the Philippines, South Korea and China.”

But if it’s meant to be evidence, you need something to show that heat waves and wildfires in Turkey and Cyprus, or somewhere at any given time, and heavy rain and storms in Southeast Asia, show anything other than that the same old stuff is going on. Otherwise it’s not even cherry-picking because it is acarpous. (H/t Rex Stout’s “Nero Wolfe” books, the word means “fruitless. You’re welcome. Especially as our spellchecker didn’t know it either.)

P.S. By the way, for archival spelunkers we have realized there’s a problem with MSN links, namely that they expire. Insofar as possible we are now trying to link to the original story and apologize if you click on past ones and get 404ed. We only just realized how widespread the issue is and if you think we were slow on the uptake we cannot argue, just apologize.