Roger Pielke Jr., who we noted last week had caught the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine violating its mandate to engage in advocacy, has just fried a much bigger fish. In a piece for the Free Press “How to Fake Climate Science and Fool the World” he doesn’t just skewer World Weather Attribution for blaming the deadly Nepal-Tibet flood on climate change, he announces that “Over the past months I have replicated 96 WWA studies. Beyond the headlines and under the hood, I can now document how the methods of the WWA project do not actually perform any legitimate analysis that would actually link the weather event to climate change. They simply assume it.” Meaning once again prominent leaders in the climate science community, the universities that host them, the press who amplify them and the governments that appoint them to prominent advisory roles are pushing opinions as fact and assumptions as findings, all in the service of the latest alarmist talking point. What a scandal, for them and for Imperial College London which houses the WWA. And for everyone who rushed to cite their work because they liked what it said not how it was done.
We have ourselves continued to watch the coverage of the catastrophe, the physical one not the scientific one, including the fact that while people’s understanding of what happened changed, their opinion as to why it happened did not. And that opinion was, far too often, that of the WWA. Reuters “Sustainable Switch”, for instance, emailed on Sept. 17 that:
“‘There’s absolutely no doubt that human-induced climate change played a role here in the preconditioning of the disaster through permafrost thawing, through thinning of the glaciers, through having more rainfall instead of snow,’ said Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London.”
Yeah. A climatologist with WWA at ICL. (“Sustainable Switch” still hasn’t managed to post its newsletters online, BTW, and thinks an important sustainability story is “Pop Star Ed Sheeran’s opening act and his own band quit tour in solidarity with Macklemore over his ‘free Palestine’ remarks”.) That same day the Guardian bellowed:
“Climate breakdown probably weakened the glacier that collapsed causing catastrophic floods and killing over a thousand people in Nepal and Tibet last month, the first scientific study of the disaster has found…. ‘Communities in Nepal are paying with their lives for a crisis driven by fossil fuel emissions thousands of miles away,’ said Dr Friederike Otto, a climate science professor at Imperial College London, which carried out the study.”
A climate science professor with WWA at ICL. And she would, wouldn’t she?
Oh yes indeed. We ourselves have long objected that WWA is not and cannot be doing real research because they get their answers so fast that it’s obvious they’re preprogrammed. And RPJ loves statistical work so he got into the guts of it and it’s offal, all right. As he notes:
“Major media outlets ran with it, claiming that WWA’s scientists had concluded that the collapse was the result of human-caused global warming…. WWA scientists have now repeated this sequence more than 120 times since its founding in 2014: They issue a press release and technical report after a significant weather event, and link the event to climate change. The scientists then purport to explain how much climate change has tilted the odds for such events – three times more likely, 10 times more likely, impossible without climate change, etc. The media around the world then publicize the claims, invariably without challenge.”
Indeed. But why no challenge from climate scientists? Aren’t they interested in what’s true and what’s not? Are they afraid to look?
If so, in once sense they should be, because, RPJ adds of his actual testing of methodology:
“applying the WWA methods I can link any measure that increases or decreases with time to climate change, whether that trend is weather-related or not. What’s more, I can replace increasing global temperatures with any other measure that is trending up or down, and show how that measure makes the weather event worse or more likely. Did increases in global patent applications make rainfall worse in a 2019 typhoon in Japan? If you use the WWA’s attribution methodology, you can ‘prove’ it – as I did.”
Exactly. It’s not GIGO, it’s ZIZO. As in “Zealotry In, Zealotry Out”. In uncharacteristically pointed language, he sneers: “The A in WWA means attribution, but it really ought to mean assumption.”
And it’s all fun and games until somebody loses a reputation because if it’s really true that you can put anything in and get “caused by man-made climate change” out sooner or later someone will notice. Or until someone loses a life, since he also complains that:
“WWA also asserted that early warning systems were useless against an event of that scale, and called for a rapid exit from fossil fuels to reduce the risks of future such events.”
Who saw that one coming? Anyone who’d read the previous 120+ reports, that’s who.
According to Wikipedia:
“Friederike (Fredi) Elly Luise Otto (born 29 August 1982) is a climate scientist and physicist and Professor of Climate Science at Imperial College London. She is an Honorary Research Associate of the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on answering the question whether and to what extent extreme weather conditions change as a result of external climate drivers.”
Alas, her research does not focus on answering that question. It focuses on ducking it. And she does not examine the extent to which we did it. She asserts it. Whereas the article just goes on puffing her:
“A highly recognised expert in the field of attribution research, she examines the extent to which human-caused climate change as well as vulnerability and exposure are responsible for events such heat waves, droughts and floods. Together with climate scientist Geert Jan van Oldenborgh she founded the international project World Weather Attribution which she still leads. In 2021, she was included in the Time 100, Time’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She was also one of ten scientists who had had important roles in scientific developments in 2021 highlighted in the scientific journal Nature.”
But why, when her methodology is so shabby?
Of course the key question now is whether all the people using her work for support not illumination will take the slightest notice of RPJ’s debunking.
Don’t hold your breath.
Thank you for doing real science for the plebs like me. The instantaneous, knee jerk "climate research" reports are so lockstep with each other, that that in itself should be making us question them. You are providing a "look under the hood" that the climate alarmists and media are not. Please keep up your good work.
She says "There’s absolutely no doubt that human-induced climate change played a role here in the preconditioning of the disaster through permafrost thawing, through thinning of the glaciers, through having more rainfall instead of snow,"
My first exhibit in rebuttal is: https://rumble.com/v7f6f50-jonathan-cohler-fossil-fuel-combustion-drove-essentially-none-of-the-atmosp.html?e9s=src_v1_cbl%2Csrc_v1_ucp_a. This analysis follows and supports several other papers that show human emissions have almost no effect on atmospheric CO2 and thus cannot destroy our climate. Not only is her data analysis wrong she erroneously assumes the increase in atmospheric CO2 is the cause and we are the culprits producing it . Wrong on all sides.
Due to the political, climate hysteria, NGO, rent-seeker complex, My guess would be that such climate junk-science is a feature rather than a bug.
Their response to everything with the same answer reminds me of an old saying, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail."
David,
Jonathan Cohler is wrong in his analysis, because he conflates diffusion of molecules across boundaries with the effect of increased partial pressure. Let me explain:
Even if the atmosphere and oceans are in complete balance with respect to CO2 concentration, there is still an exchange of molecules across the boundary. Millions of times per second per square foot, let's call it a billion just to have a number, CO2 molecules from the air enter and become dissolved in the water, and the same number of molecules already dissolved in the water spontaneously come out of solution and escape into the air.
The tendency of air molecules (including CO2 and CH4) to enter the water (liquid), depends on the 'partial pressure' of this gas, i.e. the concentration times absolute pressure. Conversely, the tendency of gas to come out of solution depends on concentration AND temperature of the water. The temperature of the atmosphere has no influence. This is called 'Henry's Law of Dissolved Gases'.
On top of the phenomenon of diffusion, as cold seawater upwells from the deep it might be in balance with the atmosphere (temperature, partial pressure and concentration in water), but as the water heats up as it moves toward the tropics, it will outgas quite a bit of CO2, which originated in the water (sea). Later on, as the water moves poleward again, the water cools, and it absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere. This process takes decades or centuries but leads to a significant exchange of CO2 molecules between oceans and atmosphere, even when atmospheric CO2 concentration and temperature is stable - which it never really is!
By this mechanism, atmospheric CO2, with higher C14 content, is exchanged with oceanic CO2 with lower C14 content. And fossil CO2 with very low C14 content is exchanged with oceanic with low C14 content.
All of the above happens WITHOUT a net transport of CO2 between oceans and atmosphere.
Now, when suddenly the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is increased due to burning of fossil fuels, this raises the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere, causing a *net* transport of CO2 from the atmosphere to the oceans, albeit at a much lower rate. The rate is proportional to the atmospheric concentration, and the concentration the upwelling seawater 'was expecting', i.e. the concentration in the atmosphere when that water last sunk from the surface centuries ago. Curve fitting confirms that the annual absorption of CO2 is directly proportional to the atmospheric concentration minus 280ppm. This phenomenon is fundamentally different to removal of C14 CO2 from nuclear testing, so no analogue can be drawn from how fast individual molecules are exchanged to how fast a net addition is absorbed (partially) by the oceans.
All of the above has an analogue with plants, however here the turnover rate is much faster, as many plants go through complete lifecycles in just a few years.
The Oceans hold some 50 times more CO2 that the atmosphere.
The WWA is like a "WAA" - World Astrological Attribution center: An organization that can always post-dict (never pre-dict) an event, "proving" that, for example, an earthquake was a result of astrology eg. "when the moon is in the 7th house and Jupiter aligns with Mars there'll be a whole lot of shakin' going on". And then all the tabloids that print astrology charts will say "See! Here's PROOF that astrology is real, because the WAA was able to attribute the earthquake to astrology!" And so the tabloids fund WAA to provide the proof they need; and the WAA attributes everything to astrology to keep their funders happy.