It’s Not Science transcript
John Robson:
This just in! Canadian companies convicted of burning up planet. After show trial, hydrocarbon plutocrats sentenced to economic death.
As you see this breaking news caught me on the road here in this hotel. But somebody has to say something, so for the Climate Discussion Nexus, I’m John Robson, and this is our Quick Reaction response to the pseudoscientific claim that Canadian companies are destroying the Earth… a bit. And that response is that this court has no legitimacy at all. What it’s doing is no more science than what Lysenko did. It’s politics in a wig, and ugly politics at that.
According to a media-friendly study in Nature, complete with its own lurid press release, sorry, “News Article”, “Dozens of heatwaves linked to carbon emissions from specific companies”, the weather attribution wizards have nailed not just human CO2 but yes, individual firms for causing bad weather and they shall be sued into extinction. After all, the very purpose for which this new “weather attribution” was invented, which is to bypass the tedious necessity of detecting trends in weather before explaining them, was not to facilitate understanding but to facilitate lawsuits.
As Roger Pielke Jr. recently growled, while examining a hatchet job on the U.S. Department of Energy’s skeptical “red team” climate report. He said, “in my areas of expertise” he had found “numerous statements that were simply false – among them that World Weather Attribution was not created with litigation in mind”.
And how does he know that that claim was false? Because he did actual research, including finding a quotation 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. And here we go. As the Nature propaganda said:
“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.”
So it’s revealing, and not in a good way, that the Nature 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 Patrick Brown pointed out this January, their tricks for stacking the jury box include, in this case in order to attribute droughts to human evil and folly, overwhelmingly studying places where drought had increased even though globally there were more places where it decreased.
You know, just in case their models let them down. But they’re not likely to.
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”. That is, before the invention of the internal combustion automobile.
Now the obvious implication here, and the correct one, is that these models would find such a signal anywhere, because we’re told that in 1885 atmospheric CO2 was around 293 parts per million just a whisker above the 280 ppm that alarmists wrongly believe was constant in “pre-industrial” times.
That very small change couldn’t possibly have measurably affected the weather. Such a fluctuation is very obviously noise, not signal, especially when its coming from “Ice cores”, whose bubbles take decades, or even centuries, to seal. Yet the source here tells us that in 1885 it was 293.3 parts per million. Point three.
And this 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. It shows “error bars”. Fake science bludgeons the public with spurious decimal places.
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. Surely you suspected your rigged models would convict the defendant of a serious crime. After all, it’s what they’re for.
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.
Waak waak waak waak. I mean, one might retort de minimis lex non curat if not educated in a government school, but instead in Latin or in sound constitutional and legal principles. Or you might say “Get the heck out of my lab” if you’ve been educated in science, because there is no way, no way at all, that 0.01 out of 1.30 is signal and not noise here.
Now, to his credit, or that of the shattered remains of his conscience, 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.” Yeah. Indeed they’re so rare that there’s no statistically sound way of determining how likely they are.
As we pointed out in our “Turning Down The Heatwaves” Fact Check video with regard to that 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome that the alarmists so love, “the heatwave could be viewed as ‘virtually impossible’ without global warming. But it was virtually impossible with it as well. Sometimes weird things happen.” What’s more, World Weather Attribution’s gleeful attribution of it 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 saying that of course they couldn’t really know.
But did it dent their popularity or their self-confidence? Hoo hah!
This study in Nature 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? But it gets worse 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. But they don’t.
They have no idea. There weren’t systematic measurements of daily temperature in most of the world even into the mid-20th century, and the proxies when you go further back 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 a spreadsheet attached to the study that, for instance, Cenovus Energy alone increased the probability of an early 2009 heatwave in Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania’s Northern provinces by 1.01% and its intensity by, get this, 0.0003 °C. Four decimal places! As the Duke of Wellington once said, ‘if you believe that, you’ll believe anything’.
It's also anti-scientific to claim to give a change in global temperature to two decimal places over the last 175 years, when nobody knows the temperature anywhere to within one decimal place a century ago.
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 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 that it’s basically all on us.
The chutzpah here is astounding. But it’s exactly the kind of thing they do. And if you used the same warped modeling to assess the share of some other human activity, you’d dependably get a searing indictment. And in fact, if you used it on all of them, I’ll bet you you’d get over 100% of that 1.3°C, never mind of whatever smaller share actually wasn’t natural. But they don’t run that kind of test, because what they’re doing isn’t science. They’re not seeking truth and testing theories ruthlessly. They’re zealots 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.”
And 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. So they don’t even know what climate change is. And all those double decimals swirling around trying to hypnotize you are a dead giveaway they’re in over their heads, or worse.
And it is worse, because they also don’t know what science is. They don’t do counterfactuals and consider what extreme events might have been prevented by warming, as well as caused by it. And they’re certainly 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 that we caused bad weather, and then they say “Gotcha” when the computer duly says “Yes, we caused bad weather”. And then they speed-dial their lawyer.
That CBC item included the usual guff from the usual suspects, including Naomi Oreskes. It said: “referring to previous research from her and other experts showing major oil companies knew about the impacts of carbon emissions and the dangers of global warming decades before countries starting enacting climate policies.” Right. Trotskii was a conscious agent of fascism, and Imperial Oil has been trying to incinerate the Earth for half a century. And now it’s been proved to two decimal places to the satisfaction of people in the media who barely survived Grade 10 math.
So, while speaking of people not doing science when it is their job, let us also mention people not doing journalism when it is their job. CTV, for instance, pounced on this supposed study and shrieked “These Canadian companies among humanity’s biggest carbon emitters, study says”. But the study says nothing of the kind.
And in fact nor really does the story, which includes this bit:
“The 14 largest carbon emitters were led by fossil fuel and coal producers from the former Soviet Union and China, followed by oil companies Saudi Aramco, Gazprom and ExxonMobil. Together, they made the same contribution to climate change as the remaining 166 entities, according to the study.”
So, Canada’s eight enemies of humanity actually ranked between 70th and 163rd. And together they supposedly warmed the planet by 0.01°C over nearly two centuries. Which means if they kept at it for another 1,750 years they might warm the place by 0.1°C. And anyone who tells you that they can calculate the impact on the weather of such a trivial change is a charlatan and a rogue. And journalists who parrot such claims without any attempt to do basic math, let alone probe how the authors think they know these things or what other views exist, belong at Pravda not in free-world newspapers.
Now, before concluding, your honour, we wish to say one thing directly to the prisoners currently slumped in the dock or on the lam. The CBC reported that it “reached out to several carbon majors mentioned in the story, but they either declined to comment or didn't respond by publication time.” Likewise: “Nature also reached out to the following companies for comment on the study’s findings but did not receive a response: BP, Shell, Chevron, National Iranian Oil Company and Coal India.”
And what, indeed, could they say? The hydrocarbon energy companies have for too long, and with too few exceptions, followed a strategy of appeasement, confessing on the science and groveling on the policy, endorsing Net Zero in the hope of being the last ones shot. But since everybody gets shot, it was always a terrible plan, and with the execution fast approaching, it’s time to abandon it.
Of course, if you honestly believe that your product is destroying the Earth, you should say so and get the heck out of that line of work. But if you don’t believe it, stand up for yourselves and not just by saying that the other companies are worse.
Because these climate fanatics are not gonna stop. They plan to destroy you, using pseudo-science to win lawfare. They intend to sue you into oblivion, you the companies that the rest of us rely on to avoid starving and freezing. And then they’re gonna wonder why it got dark all of a sudden. And darkness at noon in the lab definitely has something to do with it.
So please, don’t just stand there. Say something. Plead not guilty. Because you’re not, and they are.
For the Climate Discussion Nexus, I’m John Robson and that’s our quick response to this Nature study indicting oil companies for setting the planet on fire.
