By Chuck Ross and Thomas Catenacci
World Weather Attribution was founded in 2014 to produce research linking extreme weather events to climate change. That research is then funneled to mainstream media outlets, giving them what the group calls the “larger global warming context” as they cover natural disasters.
The group found a friend in Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who in 2022 announced a $10 million grant to WWA and two other organizations to “scale effective communication on the links between climate change and extreme weather.” The Bezos Earth Fund said the money would provide the WWA an outlet to “reach the most important audience segments via trusted messengers.”
One such messenger is Bezos’s newspaper, the Washington Post, which has cited WWA research in more than 70 stories over the past three years, a Washington Free Beacon review found. It does so uncritically, publishing the group’s non-peer-reviewed findings to suggest that climate change is to blame for recent natural disasters, including Hurricane Milton. Nonpartisan experts in the field, however, are not so sure of WWA’s methods, portraying the group’s flashy studies as rushed, partisan, and “incomplete.”
Bezos’s funding for the group, paired with the Washington Post‘s favorable coverage of its research, raises questions about the newspaper’s declared independence from its billionaire owner. The Post’s stories citing WWA do not acknowledge that Bezos—who purchased the paper in 2013, one year before the group’s founding—also bankrolls WWA.
“The motivation is entirely political,” Ryan Maue, the former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said of the climate group. “I’m not sure what the scientific community’s opinion on it is, but my guess is that it has gotten along this far because of its political weight and the media attention that it is given, meaning you don’t want to be on the wrong side of this.”
Maue particularly criticized WWA’s methodology, which consists of determining the probability of a recent extreme weather event, comparing it with the probability of a similar event that occurred decades ago, and attributing the difference to climate change. That leads to flashy findings—but not necessarily accurate ones, according to Maue, who argued that the WWA values speed over accuracy and, as such, produces “incomplete” research.
“What they are able to put out is the headline that climate change made Hurricane Helene worse and then count on the scientific illiteracy of the corporate media in order to produce headlines that become, you know, more and more outlandish, making claims that obviously are not supported by the science,” he told the Free Beacon.
“Something that’s, let’s say, a 1 percent chance of happening every year is now a 10 percent chance,” Maue said in an interview, noting the subjectivity of WWA’s methods. “So that’s a 1,000 percent increase. But, in actuality, you’re operating in the extreme tails of the distribution—you’re able to then discuss percent changes that are, you know, hysterically large.”
WWA research cited in the Post includes studies that blamed climate change for catastrophic worldwide floods in September, an August heat wave across the United States, and a February drought in South America’s Amazon River Basin, in addition to Hurricane Milton.
WWA concluded in its study published Friday, for example, that the hurricane’s rainfall was 20 to 30 percent heavier because of man-made climate change. And that study was published less than 48 hours after the storm made landfall in Florida—speed is a hallmark of the group’s research, allowing it to publicize eye-popping conclusions while the weather event in question is still top-of-mind for news consumers.
“The study from the World Weather Attribution network — a team of scientists who analyze how climate change contributes to extreme weather events — found that storms as wet as Milton are twice as likely to occur because of global warming,” the Post’s report on Milton stated. “Powered by record heat in the Gulf of Mexico, the hurricane’s winds were 10 percent faster than they would have been in a world not altered by greenhouse gas emissions.”
WWA chief scientist and founder Friederike Otto, meanwhile, has openly acknowledged that her group exists in part to create evidence that can then be admissible in climate litigation, including high-stakes cases accusing oil companies of bearing financial responsibility for weather events.
The studies are used to “pressure policymakers” and are also meant to spur “companies like the major fossil fuel companies to change their business model and to do more,” Otto explained.
The group has also stated part of its mission is to cultivate support for mitigation policies, including shutting down fossil fuels. In its September story on global floods, the Post quoted WWA researcher Joyce Kimutai, who said such weather events “will keep getting worse until we replace fossil fuels with cleaner, renewable sources of energy.”
It is unclear whether Bezos or his nonprofit had communicated with the Post about featuring WWA. The fund referred a request for comment to the Post, which said in a statement it is “an independent news organization committed to covering the consequential issue of climate change, including the leaders, organizations and forces involved.” The paper, though, has been embroiled in a series of conflict-of-interest scandals over the past year.
In the aftermath of last year’s October 7 attack in Israel, the newspaper’s foreign desk was found to employ numerous veterans of Qatar-funded Al Jazeera. In June, Post executive editor Sally Buzbee quit the paper after revelations that she faced pressure to kill a story about Post CEO Will Lewis’s involvement in a British phone hacking scandal. And over the summer, the Post launched a review of columns written by Max Boot after his wife was indicted as an unregistered foreign agent of South Korea. Boot co-wrote multiple columns with his wife about Korean foreign policy.
WWA didn’t respond to a request for comment. The Bezos Earth Fund referred a request for comment to the Washington Post.
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Best secret junk science Jezz Bezos can buy:
1. WaPo owner Jeff Bezos gave $10 million to World Weather Attribution to blame weather on climate.
2. What @WWAttribution does is pure fraud. https://t.co/7wMTYwF999
3. Although the WaPo cites World Weather Attribution all the… pic.twitter.com/pgQfUjAaJ6
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) October 21, 2024
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