Role of Climate Change in LA Wildfires “Not Statistically Significant”, Says Report Author – Watts Up With That?

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

Climate change was a major factor behind the recent Los Angeles wildfires, reported Matt McGrath of the BBC last January. According to a ‘scientific study’ instantly produced by World Weather Attribution (WWA), the prevailing weather conditions were made about 35% more likely due to humans using hydrocarbons. The WWA study, according to the trusting McGrath, is said to confirm this somewhat precise attribution of blame. Possibly the BBC and most of the mainstream that also parroted the WWA line might consider some corrective copy in the light of a devasting critique of the claims from the theoretical physicist, science writer and prominent youtuber Dr Sabine Hossenfelder. In a YouTube video broadcast here that has gone viral on social media, she elicited an astonishing admission from one of the report’s authors that, “as you can see from the numbers, the changes in intensity and likelihood are unsurprisingly not statistically significant”.

Not statistically significant is exactly what Hossenfelder found since she noted that the figures supplied by the WWA were outside a 95% statistical probability level. Her broadcast goes into detail about the outlier numbers falling outside the 95% level meaning that an alternative explanation is that climate change had no part to play in the LA fires. In fact Hossenfelder was so appalled by the work that she was inclined to be harsh in her conclusions. “It is so bad that I have sincere doubts that even the authors read it,” she says, adding it was so bad that “it is actually quite funny”. Wondering why other scientists don’t complain, she notes: “Whenever there is some crap going around the media, they look away and keep their mouths shut.”

But the laughter has a touch of gallows humour since Hossenfelder is concerned about matters of public policy arising from such widespread fearmongering. Wildfires affect the lives of millions of people and the claims of the WWA broadcast worldwide by unquestioning activists are policy relevant numbers, she observes. People in LA need to consider their response to the recent tragedy and judge whether it will happen more frequently in the future, she says, observing: “This research matters for people’s lives.” Of course similar observations can be made about all the other mainstream pseudoscience babble designed to deliberately induce mass climate psychosis and promote the collectivist Net Zero fantasy.

Lost in all the mainstream narrative-driven madness was any report about the recent sensational scientific finding that wildfires across the United States and Canada were occurring at a rate of only 23% of that expected from a review of the tree ring fire scar record going back to the 17th century. The findings published in Nature Communications effectively blew the politicised wildfire climate change scam out of the water. It was noted that a current ”widespread fire deficit” persisted across a range of forest types, and the areas burned in the recent past “are not unprecedented”.

Such was the alarm created by these inconvenient findings that one pre-publication reviewer noted: “I see this paper as potentially being used by deniers of climate change impacts.” Advice was given to rephrase “to put even more emphasis on impact rather than burned area”. In other words, concentrate on emotion rather than facts to help produce the Ultra Processed Message that is slowly but surely destroying faith in both climate science and the useful idiot media.

Regular readers will of course be familiar with the activities of World Weather Attribution. Part founded by Green Blob-funded Climate Central, which specialises in publication-ready catastrophic climate copy, it is run out of Imperial College in London where it is part of the green billionaire-funded Grantham Institute. It is run by the frequent BBC broadcaster Dr Friederike Otto and has a number of international partners including the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the Red Cross Crescent Climate Centre. It aims to make a near-instant assessment as to whether an extreme weather event is made worse by humans burning hydrocarbons. It does this by using computer models to compare the results of two imaginary climates operating with different levels of carbon dioxide. Such an approach, using models to pick out individual events in a chaotic atmosphere full of little understood influences, has its critics. The distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr. calls it weather attribution alchemy. He argues that the extreme position of attributing individual bad weather events is “roughly aligned” with the far Left. For her part, Otto states that event attribution was originally suggested with the courts in mind. The main function of these studies is to support lawfare against hydrocarbon companies, and she explains this strategy in some detail in the interview ‘From Extreme Event Attribution to Climate Litigation’.

The BBC is clearly a fan. Former Radio 4 editor Sarah Sands wrote the foreword to a WWA guide for journalists claiming the attribution studies have given us “significant insight into the horsemen of the climate apocalypse”. Pielke is less gushing, noting a “less charitable explanation is that there is a systematic effort underway to contest and undermine actual climate science, including the assessments of the IPCC, in order to present a picture of reality that is simply false in support of climate advocacy”.

Timed to make next day headlines, WWA weather attributions are not peer-reviewed. However the studies follow established methods which it is claimed have been “peer-reviewed and assessed as scientifically reliable”. How comforting to discover that the peer-review claim links to a paper written by none other than Dr Otto along with numerous authors from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the Red Cross Crescent Climate Centre.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

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