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.