No, it’s not a big comeuppance for peddlers of alarmist nonsense. Quite the opposite: all the major energy firms who have spent years, and many millions, making nice to the greens in the hopes they will leave them alone finally saw where it all leads. A clickbait pseudoscientific study in Nature would have you believe the weather attribution wizards can not only pin specific heatwaves on humanity and its carbon fumes generally, it can indict particular Canadian as well as other energy firms to as many decimal places as your credulity can stand. And then they can be sued into oblivion. Bloomberg Green pounced with “Scientists Link Major Carbon Emitters to Worsening Heat Waves”. NPR went with “A new study links these recent heat waves – and more than 200 others – to human-caused climate change, and the greenhouse gas pollution of major fossil fuel producers.” It made it into Africanews. And the CBC swooped as well, cawing “Climate change is making heat waves worse. A new study shows how specific companies are fuelling the problem”. It didn’t name individuals but, heh heh, just give them time.

That CBC item piece was labeled “Science” but in case anyone missed the point the subhed chuckled “Attributing heat waves directly to carbon majors could influence climate litigation”. Because as we said in our “Quick Response” video on the paper, what we have here is not science. It’s politics in a wig, and ugly politics.

It came with its own lurid press release, sorry, in-house “News Article”, which under the heading “Dozens of heatwaves linked to carbon emissions from specific companies” insisted that the weather attribution wizards have nailed not just human CO2 but yes, individual firms for causing bad weather. And:

“The findings could provide fresh evidence to support lawsuits seeking to hold companies accountable for their impacts on the climate.”

Which is after all the very purpose for which this new “weather attribution” was invented, to bypass the tedious necessity of detecting trends in weather before explaining them and instead facilitate not understanding but lawsuits.

As Roger Pielke Jr. recently growled about a would-be rebuttal to the U.S. Department of Energy’s skeptical “red team” climate report, on examining that response “in my areas of expertise” he found “numerous statements that were simply false – among them that World Weather Attribution was not created with litigation in mind”.

How does he know it’s false? Because they said so and he checked it out. So he presents a quotation directly from WWA’s chief scientist, Friederike Otto, that “Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.”

Of course it was. So it’s revealing, and not in a good way, that the study itself credits up front: “approaches promoted by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative and other methods.”

Alarmists don’t love weather attribution because it conducts fair trials. They love it because it convicts everybody, with roughly the subtlety of Andrei Vyshinsky or Lavrenti Beria. But it is not science.

As we noted in June, dizzy with success, the fellow travellers at CNN touted a study where:

“Using a combination of scientific theory, modern observations and multiple, sophisticated computer models, researchers found a clear signal of human-caused climate change was likely discernible with high confidence as early as 1885”.

Yes, folks, before the invention of the car. The obvious implication, and the correct one, is that these models would find such a signal anywhere, because we’re told in 1885 atmospheric CO2 was around 293 parts per million a whisker above the 280 ppm alarmists wrongly believe was constant in “pre-industrial” times.

It couldn’t possibly have measurably affected the weather. Such a fluctuation is very obviously noise not signal, especially coming from “Ice cores”, whose bubbles take decades, even centuries, to seal. Yet the source here tells us in 1885 it was 293.3 parts per million. Point three.

According to the CBC’s credulous take, “‘I was surprised that even the smallest carbon majors were actually very substantially contributing to the probability of the heat waves,’ said Yann Quilcaille, a climate scientist at ETH Zürich, who led the study.”

Oh come now. Surprised? Pffft. Surely you suspected your rigged models would convict the defendant of a serious crime. After all, it’s what they were designed for. Your boss said so.

The mathiness looks impressive. But it’s actually another key warning sign that something that is not science is lurching about in a stolen lab coat. Real science deals in uncertainties, in “error bars”. Fake science bludgeons the public with spurious decimal places.

And here we go. The study allegedly found that major oil companies alone caused more than half the supposed 1.3°C warming since pre-industrial times, and that of that share, Canadian companies caused 0.01°C. Which might lead someone familiar with law to retort “De minimis lex non curat”. And someone familiar with science to retort “De minimis scientia non curat” because there’s no way, no way at all, that 0.01 out of 1.30 is signal not noise.

What’s truly extraordinary about the news coverage is the spectacular lack of curiosity, let alone skepticism. Or rather, what’s extraordinary is that their gullibility is in no way extraordinary. These sorts of claims are, after all, themselves remarkable. Do these researchers really know the answer is 0.01°C, and not, say, 0.00°C? And how do they know it? These are the sorts of questions you’d hope a reporter would ask, or be berated by an editor for not considering. But not the sorts that, nowadays, you’d expect them to ask. Instead they simply regurgitate the party line. For instance, in the Bloomberg Green recitation:

“To calculate how climate change affects the likelihood and intensity of heat waves, the study’s authors analyzed 213 heat waves between 2000 and 2023 that caused significant social and economic disruptions. As WWA does in their analyses of individual events, the researchers used computer models to simulate how the heat waves would have unfolded under a preindustrial climate, compared with current times. Their findings show that global warming has made heat waves more likely and more intense, and the situation has worsened over time.”

Oh well then. The researchers used computer models. So not “findings”. Comparison of what we think happened with what we have no idea might have. We do not have reliable temperature data for most of the world even 80 to 100 years ago, and the proxies from earlier times are too imprecise to give any useful indication of how common or how intense heat waves were in, say, 1750 or 1150.

The computer models are just telling the researchers what they want to hear, and they’re doing so because the researchers told them to. But didn’t anyone in the media office wonder about this passage?

“To be more specific, the heat waves became 20 times more likely between 2000 and 2009, compared with the preindustrial period between 1850 and 1900, and as much as 200 times more likely between 2010 and 2019.”

Anyone with an ounce of math brans can see that, if this statement is true, then heat waves were 10 times as likely in the 2010s as in the 00’s. But if “likely” means what it used to mean, then in consequence there must have been roughly 10 times as many heat waves in the latter decade as in the former. The problem is, er, we were around then. And of course there weren’t.

When we say “of course” we mean it. And we mean “as the reporter-like object would immediately have discovered if they’d checked”. Which they plainly did not.

Oh well. Yellow journalism isn’t exactly new, though it used to be at the bottom of the industry and now it’s at the top. But No Longer Scientific American was just as gullible, or complicit:

“Big Oil’s Emissions Caused about 25 Percent of Heat Waves since 2000/ A new study finds that one quarter of heat waves between 2000 and 2023 would have been ‘virtually impossible’ without global warming – and can be attributed to the emissions of individual energy producers”.

Once upon a time lay persons read that publication to be kept abreast of science. Now they read it to be indoctrinated or in some rare cases amused. For instance by the opening sentence of that article, which was very close to a flat-out lie:

“Climate scientists have been attributing storms, droughts and heatwaves to global warming for two decades.”

No they have not. Indeed, their unwillingness to do so without convincing evidence was precisely the problem. It was frustration at the refusal even of some who believed in the general theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming to sacrifice their principles for that kind of “Gotcha!”, including at the IPCC, that led to the creation of “weather attribution” generally and World Weather Attribution in particular.

Now if you were a chump who somehow expected SA to give you real science in plain language, or at least as plain as the subject permitted, you’d expect the piece to delve into the vexed question of methodology. After all, as noted, these are bold claims, even implausible ones. So how do they think they know, and are there other views worth considering?

These days SA and its readers would be among the last to know. Instead it’s full sue ahead:

“A study published today in Nature shows that around one-quarter of the heatwaves recorded over 2000–23 can be directly linked to greenhouse-gas emissions from individual energy giants. The findings could provide fresh evidence to support lawsuits seeking to hold companies accountable for their impacts on the climate. ‘I cannot as a scientist assign legal responsibilities for these events,’ says lead author Yann Quilcaille, a climate researcher at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. ‘What I can say is that each one of these carbon majors is contributing to heatwaves, making them more intense and also making them more likely.’”

Such noble restraint. But is it really true? Might someone question it? If so, they don’t work for this magazine:

“This is not the first time that climate impacts have been attributed to fossil-fuel producers, but Quilcaille and his team go one step further than their predecessors and link individual companies directly to specific heatwaves. Legal experts say it’s a line of evidence that could feed into climate litigation that focuses on specific events, such as the 2021 heatwave that hammered the US Pacific Northwest in 2021. Already, a county government in Oregon has filed a US$52-billion civil lawsuit against fossil-fuel companies for contributing to that event.”

Experts say. But not scientific experts. And how does SA know which legal experts are credible on this file? Ah well, here’s where things get really disgusting. Because this piece, published by Scientific American, isn’t by Scientific American. Heck no. It’s by a flack at Nature peddling the study, which was also published independently by Nature.

If Scientific American had been in the business of putting its imprimatur on material from Trofim Lysenko’s Yarovizatsiya calling geneticists who doubted the inheritance of acquired characteristics members of the “Trotskyist-Bukharinist opposition” it would have forfeited its reputation nine decades ago. It’s doing it now.

Speaking of sound statistical procedures, which we at least insist on doing, in his puff piece that Scientific American also ran, Nature’s Jeff Tollefson does admit that:

“Despite the eye-popping estimates for responsibilities allocated to individual carbon majors, the uncertainties remain high in many instances, in large part because the most extreme heatwaves are statistically rare.”

Indeed. As we pointed out in our “Turning Down The Heawaves” Fact Check video with regard to the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome the alarmists so love, they’re so rare that there’s no statistically sound way of determining how likely they are:

“the heatwave could be viewed as ‘virtually impossible’ without global warming. But it was virtually impossible with it as well. Sometimes weird things happen.”

As we also noted, World Weather Attribution’s hasty gleeful attribution of that heat dome to humans and our Carbon Original Sin was eventually submitted to a serious journal and so rubbished by one of the reviewers that they had to add a bunch of disclaimers that of course they couldn’t really know.

Undaunted, this study says:

“The median estimate indicates that climate change has also increased the probability of heatwaves by more than 10,000”.

Ten thousand what, we ask? Percent? Times? It’s kind of important to the story.

Or maybe not, because this kind of talk suggests that they know how common and intense heat waves were around 1850 and how common and intense they are now and of course they don’t.

Not that the various journalists knew or cared. But they have no idea. There weren’t systematic measures of daily temperature in most of the world even into the mid-20^th century, and the proxies certainly give no idea how common or intense they were even a century ago, let alone 500 years. So they’re making it up, then hiding it with decimals, saying in an attached spreadsheet that, for instance, Cenovus Energy alone increased the probability of an early 2009 heatwave in “Victoria, New South wales (South), Tasmania (Northern) provinces” by 1.01% and its intensity by, get this, 0.0003 °C. Four decimal places! And as the Duke of Wellington once said, if you believe that you’ll believe anything, especially as weather agencies don’t report weather to even one decimal place.

And another thing. We actually do know that during the Holocene, as earlier, the Earth has cycled regularly between warmer and cooler periods, including down from the Medieval Warm Period into the Little Ice Age, and back up after 1850. So at least some of the warming since then must by any logical standard have been natural. In which case they’re blaming oil companies alone for more than the entire human contribution. But the attributors duck this absurdity by absurdly assuming it’s basically all us.

The chutzpah here is astounding. But it’s exactly the kind of thing they do. If you used the same warped modeling to assess the share of some other human activity, you’d get a searing indictment. And if you used it on all of them, you’d get over 100% of that 1.3, never mind whatever smaller share wasn’t natural. But they don’t, because what they’re doing isn’t science, seeking truth and testing theories ruthlessly. It’s zealotry shrieking about enemies of the people.

They also write:

“With reference to 1850–1900, climate change has increased the median intensity of heatwaves by 1.36 °C over 2000–2009, of which 0.44 °C is traced back to the 14 top carbon majors and 0.22 °C to the 166 others. These contributions correspond, respectively, to 32% and 16% of the overall effect of climate change.”

Again it sounds precise, all right. But climate change is a statistical description of changes in long-term weather. It isn’t a causal force. They don’t even know what climate change is. And all those double decimals swirling around trying to hypnotize you are a dead giveaway that they’re in over their heads, or worse.

They also don’t know what science is, because they don’t do counterfactuals and consider what extreme events might have been prevented by warming as well as caused by it. They’re not comparing known extreme events today with known extreme events in the past. Instead they take what did happen, and sometimes what didn’t, match it against invented scenarios to prove we caused bad weather, and say “Gotcha” when the computer duly says so. Then they speed-dial their lawyer.

Which is not science, and doesn’t even look like it.