https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/taking-us-for-fools
Taking Us for Fools: How a turnkey method attributes any trend to climate change
By ROGER PIELKE JR.
Excerpt: One of the most brazen — and successful — propaganda campaigns sits out in plain sight. I am referring to the concerted effort by climate advocates to create a belief that “climate change” causes bad weather and disasters, and that we can prevent those bad things from happening with climate policies.
By successful, I mean that the propaganda campaign has convinced half of all Americans that “addressing climate change” will lead to “fewer or less severe weather events” that they personally experience and affect their community. As the figure below shows, among climate advocates, this belief is almost an article of faith at 80%.
At the center of the propaganda campaign are scientists who perform political alchemy by turning the symbols, authority, and institutions of expertise into public and policy maker (mis)understandings of climate science. These scientists all well know that “climate policy” — however construed — cannot reduce the number or intensity of extreme weather events in any meaningful or detectable way in my lifetime, or even my future grandkids’ lifetimes.
I am using the term propaganda here as a technical term, which Harold Lasswell defined almost a century ago as, “the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols.”
The fact that there is a propaganda campaign underway is not simply my characterization. The creators of “extreme event attribution” (EEA) — which this post is about — openly acknowledged that a primary reason for creating EEA is political: by “increasing the ‘immediacy’ of climate change, thereby increasing support for mitigation.”
Today’s post is motivated by the “study” released today on climate change and the recent Nepal flooding and mudslide by World Weather Attribution (WWA) — reflected in the headlines above.
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WWA functions as an advocacy group. It was created by Climate Central — another climate advocacy group — in 2014 and is today located at Imperial College London. WWA is funded by climate advocacy philanthropies: Grantham Foundation, the European Climate Foundation and the Bezos Earth Fund.
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WWA press releases generate a worldwide publicity blitz crediting WWA with findings that their methods cannot produce — demonstrate the single cause of particular weather event. What WWA is doing instead is seeking to manage collective attitudes by manipulating symbols.
Propaganda in short.
If WWA were just some backwater effort, none of this attention would be warranted. However, WWA has become so influential that it is threatening to displace or subsume legitimate climate science related to the detection and attribution of extreme events. In the process, EEA adherents and fellow travelers in the climate advocacy ecosystem are also corrupting authoritative institutions of science that are supposed to call things straight rather than emulate climate advocacy organizations.
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