If you want to be popular at parties it might be best to avoid an “I told you so” attitude. But to determine who actually understands what’s going on, the one who called it ahead of time surely deserves some credit if not a canapé. Including one of us writing scornfully in the Ottawa Citizen about attribution science before it was even invented, way back on Jan. 6, 1998, so far back that you can’t find it online. In that column first we noted that there was something fishy about blaming an ice storm on warming since a theory that predicts everything predicts nothing. Then we added prophetic words about a nationally-reprinted column beginning “Climate experts are hesitating to blame the worst ice storm in recorded history on global warming. But members of Jean Chrétien’s federal cabinet are privately conceding that this is more than a freak of nature.” That cabinet being a bunch of politicians “who seem not to have a science degree among them”. But the theory was structured so anyone could instantly attribute anything bad to climate change post facto. As Rudyard Kipling warned long ago, giving something a long name doesn’t make it better. And as Roger Pielke Jr. just warned, the IPCC’s half-hearted resistance to this philosophical and scientific rubbish appears decisively to have collapsed.
RPJ warns that:
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just released the names of its authors for its seventh assessment report (AR7). The author list for its Chapter 3 – Changes in regional climate and extremes, and their causes – suggests strongly that the IPCC will be shifting from its longstanding focus on detection and attribution (D&A) of extreme events to a focus on ‘extreme event attribution’ (EEA).”
In the face of which you might be forgiven for wondering what anyone thinks they’re saying when switching from detection and attribution to attribution of things detected. But there’s actually something going on here, and it’s not what proper respect for the meaning of words would entail. As Pielke Jr. explains:
“The IPCC D&A framework follows from its definition of ‘climate change’ as a change in the statistics of weather over long time periods, typically many decades. Detection refers to identifying such a change. Attribution refers to identifying causes of that change. For most extreme weather phenomena, the IPCC has not achieved detection or attribution with high confidence and does not expect to for most [of] this century.”
Ironically, therefore, the same IPCC regarded as a font of alarmist propaganda by many skeptics is increasingly regarded as a hive of reactionaries by many alarmists. They just know the weather has gotten worse and can’t understand why these running dogs won’t say so and blame climate. So they invented a whole new kind of science that dispenses with that nonsense about long-term data and careful exploration of hypotheses:
“In part due to the IPCC’s failure to achieve D&A for most types of extreme events, the notion of EEA was invented to connect specific weather events with changes in climate and characterized as an effort to get into the media and support climate litigation. Most EEA work is published outside of the scientific literature, announced by press release, and is typically contrary to peer-reviewed research on extreme events.”
Abracadabra, climate change causes everything just like those now mercifully forgotten Chrétien climate instant experts knew the minute the ice fell. And now, if you want to be credited with understanding the situation while risking social isolation, tell us who’s in charge of this new climate alchemy.
Right. You are so right. You told us so:
“World Weather Attribution (WWA) co-founder Frederika Otto has been put in charge of the chapter, along with another academic who focuses on extreme event attribution.”
Which saves a lot of time, doesn’t it? She already knows what she’s going to say and so do we. As RPJ concludes:
“Scientific assessment can be challenging in the best of circumstances. When an assessment is taken over to serve politics it ceases to be an assessment and turns into something else.”
Yeah. A popularity-killing sneer of “Told you so”.
And we did.
