We noted briefly above the reasons Robert Bryce gives for cancelling the New York Times. But shortly after drafting that piece we came across a monstrosity in, of all things, the Times, the British one that needs no adjectives, fawning over World Weather Attribution under the misleading headline “Who’s causing climate change? This expert has the answer”. And while anyone can publish a dubious Op Ed, this affront to journalism was by “Tom Whipple, Science Editor”. Who in this lavish puff piece, complete with endless fashion-magazine-style shots of Friederike Otto, a key founder of WWA, never once mentions that anyone has or even could have doubts about their scientific hocus pocus. It’s well-known that people across the spectrum think the press are biased against them. But when this pillar of the Establishment is running such rubbish, you know the revolt of the elites is essentially complete.

There are mighty few offenses against science and journalism that this piece does not commit. Including a complete lack of distance from its subject:

“Thanks to Otto, named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2021, we can put a lot more numbers on things. Otto is a climate scientist. She has colourful trainers, more piercings than most academics and — I now know — a very scary email autoreply that begins by explaining how many messages she gets and ends, ‘Emails addressed to Mrs Otto will be forwarded to my mum.’”

Partly in consequence of which it peddles scientistical buffoonery like that we now know climate change has made events like Storm Bernd in 2021 dropping “a month’s rain in a day” in Germany and the Low Countries “four times more likely” followed by “(because science is always a little messier than we would like), we can say it is 1.2 to 9 times more likely.”

So not four times more likely. A lot more likely or maybe just a little bit And let’s have a look at the lard that piece of gristle was wrapped in. First:

“For a long time when journalists wrote about extreme weather, there was a form of words we had to use. It went something like this: ‘Scientists emphasise that no individual weather event can be attributed to climate change. However, we know that warmer temperatures make such storms more likely.’”

Note right away the admission, nay boast, that journalists were making science up as they went along already. Science did not link individual events to climate change yet journalists said “we know” it was helping cause them. And it gets worse:

“The problem is, extreme weather has always happened. If something was previously a 1 in 500-years event, as with some of the extremes seen due to Bernd, it might be that its appearance is due to climate change. It could also just be that our half-millennium is up. These days, we have a different form of words, which are similar — yet so much more useful. After an event like Bernd, we can usually say something like, ‘Climate change has made events like this four times more likely.’ In fact, in the case of Bernd (because science is always a little messier than we would like), we can say it is 1.2 to 9 times more likely.”

Yeah. A different form of words. WWA has given you licence to make claims about things you don’t understand that the people who do understand it don’t make, and call it science. Whipple calls this rhetoric “useful”. But useful for what? Understanding science? Or pushing a radical agenda the science does not support? For yet again we have to say that even the IPCC in AR6 was extremely reluctant to say climate change had made almost any kind of severe weather more likely. (And not just because climate change, being a statistical description of what happened, cannot cause anything.)

People who do real science understand that if something is “a 1 in 500-years event”, or one in a thousand, or even one in a hundred, you actually need a very long time series to know whether you’re seeing a trend or just typical random fluctuations. The WWA’s modeling doesn’t solve this unfortunate problem with some piece of exceptional scientific brilliance; it dodges it with a thick slice of scientific baloney.

Whipple gushes on:

“There are other things we can say. We can say scientists estimate the heatwave last summer in the US southwest and Mexico, which saw 52C in June, was 35 times more likely.”

And we can say we’re Olympic athletes with Hollywood looks. But it wouldn’t make it true, or even plausible.

There’s no secret what WWA are up to. As we quoted Roger Pielke Jr. on this very point last October:

“For instance, researchers behind the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative explain that one of their key motives in conducting such studies is, ‘increasing the “immediacy” of climate change, thereby increasing support for mitigation.’ WWA’s chief scientist, Friederike Otto, explains, ‘Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.’ Another oft-quoted scientist who performs rapid attribution analyses, Michael Wehner, summarized their importance (emphasis in original) – ‘The most important message from this (and previous) analyses is that “Dangerous climate change is here now!”‘”

After noting sardonically that the bold-face was in the original, as was the comic-book exclamation mark, we further quoted RPJ that:

“Otto and others have been very forthright that the main function of such studies is to create a defensible scientific basis in support of lawsuits against fossil fuel companies — She explains the strategy in detail in this interview, From Extreme Event Attribution to Climate Litigation.”

OK. That’s a bit worrying surely. Science with a political agenda not just political consequences. So how does Whipple describe this same approach? Not with the gimlet eye that used to gaze relentlessly out of Fleet Street, that’s for sure:

“Each Friday at 2pm, the WWA team gets together over Zoom to decide what to look at. What has the climate been up to that week? Their criteria are not just meteorological. ‘We monitor the networks of the humanitarian aid organisations and use criteria based on humanitarian impacts to trigger events for us. So, for example, for floods, is it more than one million people, or 50 per cent of the population, affected?’ They consider whether they have the expertise and the contacts in the area. They also consider impact. ‘Is it somewhere like South Sudan, where not much attention has been paid? Is it somewhere where scientific evidence would be useful, like the LA fires?’ Then they get to work. They look at historical data. They look at climate models – running them without the CO₂ from emissions. They work out the likelihood of the event in a non-warming world, then compare the two.”

The pea is moving pretty fast here, with WWA and Whipple both at work on it. But the crucial piece of legerdemain is those last two sentences, because only if the climate models accurately describe the world with and without “the CO₂ from emissions”, and what’s more do it in terms of accurate probabilities, and they do neither, can the people at WWA “then compare the two” instead of just waving a bunch of fancy algorithms about in a courtroom or a newsroom.

And oh so bravely too. See, wonderful stylish witty “Dr Otto”, in yet another elegant flowing pantsuit and colourful rebel sneakers, branded in the cutline as “nobobyschild.com” and “converse.com”, plus credit to “HAIR AND MAKE-UP: GIA MILLS USING SKIN IN MOTION AND SAM MCKNIGHT” in a chilly display of journalistic objectivity:

“knows that, at a time when Europe has to deal with Russia on one front and with a lack of growth on another – a lack of growth that is plausibly due to energy policies – people don’t want to think about South Sudan. ‘It is an unpopular story at the moment, but I think that makes it even more important to tell it, and to try to tell it whenever there is the opportunity.’ This is why she has written a book, Climate Injustice, telling a more human story of the effects of climate change.”

Can we swoon next to you, or is all the soft ground taken? And on it simpers:

“There is another story she tells that is probably even more unpopular. Because if you can attribute cause, you can also do something else: attribute blame. If a fraction of a disaster can be attributed to climate change, and a fraction of that climate change can be attributed to specific people, countries or companies, then how much of the costs could be loaded onto them? This is not a hypothetical. After we speak, Otto will be briefing some German lawyers about a case, currently going through the courts, that tests just this principle.”

So it’s about the litigation. But in a good way.

Oh, and don’t think Whipple is an acolyte or anything. Heck no. He has lots of distance from his subject and her views:

“For someone like me who considers himself a cosy centrist, Otto can be bracing.”

No, wait. He doesn’t. The pea isn’t under the cozy centrist shell at all:

“Otto writes about a false consciousness, particularly among journalists. Of how we ‘live our entire lives in the colonial-fossil narrative dictated by a handful of lobbies to maximise profits for a few and to the disadvantage of almost everyone else, particularly the poor’. This is, for her, the obvious reason why we haven’t acted fast enough on climate change.”

And here comes the bracing journalistic skepticism: “I’m sure she has a point.”

Still, to be fair, we do want to quote the part where he talks to people skeptical of climate change. “ ” And also the part where he talks to people skeptical of WWA’s particular approach. “ ”. And to think the legacy media are losing credibility.

Must be a fossil-fuel-company plot to sow false consciousness. What else could it be?