From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
Roger Pielke Jr looks at the science (or not!) behind extreme weather attribution:
In the aftermath of many high profile extreme weather events we see headlines like the following:
For those who closely follow climate science and the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), such headlines can be difficult to make sense of because neither the IPCC nor the underlying scientific literature comes anywhere close to making such strong and certain claims of attribution.
How then might we understand such high profile claims?
Read his full analysis here.
His take away message is that weather attribution from the outset was deliberately intended for political and media purposes. It was introduced because the IPCC was able to find any real evidence that weather was actually getting more extreme.
He notes:
First, event attribution research is a form of tactical science — research performed explicitly to serve legal and political ends. This is not my opinion, but has been openly stated on many occasions by the researchers who developed and perform event attribution research.2 Such research is not always subjected to peer review, and this is often by design as peer-review takes much longer than the news cycle. Instead, event attribution studies are generally promoted via press release.
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!”
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It has certainly been successful in its objective. I can personally confirm that the BBC routinely not only headlines attribution claims as if they were fact, they even use them to reject my complaints, even when the actual data shows them to be false. To them, attribution claims and facts are interchangeable.
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