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BBC ‘internal investigation’ finds its climate editor made false claims on global warming including incorrect claims that extreme weather deaths are rising

May 10, 2022

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10799153/BBC-climate-editor-false-claims-global-warming-Panorama-broadcast-inquiry-finds.html By COLIN FERNANDEZ ENVIRONMENT EDITOR FOR THE DAILY MAIL A BBC Panorama documentary about global warming made a number of false claims, an internal investigation by the broadcaster has found. The programme Wild Weather, presented by climate editor Justin Rowlatt, said deaths worldwide were rising due to extreme weather caused by climate change – whereas the opposite is true. It also claimed Madagascar was on the verge of the first famine caused by climate change – despite other factors being involved. The programme, broadcast last November to coincide with the COP26 climate conference, sparked two complaints investigated by the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU). Last year Rowlatt’s sister Cordelia was among a number of Insulate Britain activists arrested for staging a protest at junction 3 of the M25. Miss Rowlatt, who once appeared on TV advising her brother on how to be more environmentally friendly, pleaded guilty by post at Crawley Magistrates’ Court. She was fined £300 with £85 court costs and a £34 surcharge for committing a public nuisance on a highway. The introduction of Wild Weather said ‘the death toll is rising around the world and the forecast is that worse is to come’. The ECU said this risked giving the impression the rate of deaths from extreme weather-related events was increasing. In fact, as noted by a recent report from the World Meteorological Organisation, while the number of weather-related disasters – such as floods, storms and drought – has risen in the past 50 years, the number of deaths caused by them has fallen because of improved early warnings and disaster management.

Follow the Science, Yahoo News, Climate Change is Not Causing More Extreme Weather

January 7, 2022

https://climaterealism.com/2022/01/follow-the-science-yahoo-news-climate-change-is-not-causing-more-extreme-weather/ By  H. Sterling Burnett Yahoo News posted an article titled, “Extreme weather fueled by climate change hit 4 in 10 Americans where they lived in 2021,” saying climate change is responsible for an increase in the instances and severity of extreme weather. This is false. Millions of Americans are affected by extreme weather events every year, however, data do not show instances of extreme weather are becoming more common or more severe. This fact is confirmed by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “Raging wildfires exacerbated by drought in the West; severe downpours across the Midwest, Northeast and South; deadly heat waves in the Pacific Northwest; hurricanes that unleashed destruction from the Gulf Coast up to New England: 2021 was a year when it became impossible for many Americans to ignore the extreme weather fueled by climate change,” writes Yahoo News. Each of the weather events cited by Yahoo News did happen, but there is no evidence they were caused or exacerbated by climate change. Yahoo News writes a length about heatwaves that struck the portions of the United States in 2021, but, as explored in Climate at a Glance: Heatwaves, heatwaves, extended periods of extreme above average temperatures, have been far less frequent and severe in recent decades than was the case during the 1930s – nearly 100 years of global warming ago. Indeed, majority of each state’s all-time high temperature records were set during the first half of the 20th (see the figure). Also most the accurate nationwide temperature station network, the U.S. Climate Reference Network, established by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows no sustained increase in daily high temperatures in the United States since at least 2005. Yahoo News also implies that the wildfires experienced across the Western United States, and the flooding experienced in other locations were exacerbated by climate change. Once again, the data does not bear this claim out. Concerning flooding there is no evidence flooding frequency or severity has increased as the climate has modestly warmed over the past 150 years. The IPCC reports it has “low confidence” in any climate change impact regarding the frequency or severity of floods, or in even a “sign” of any change. This means, if the IPCC is correct, climate change is just as likely to be making floods less frequent and less severe as it is to making them more frequent or severe. Nor does data from either the IPCC or the U.S. National Interagency Fire Center show wildfires have worsened when compared to historical fire seasons. Far fewer acres have been burned in wildfires in recent years than were recorded in the early part of the 20th century. What’s true for the United States is true for the Earth in general.  NASA’s satellites have been measuring global wildfires since 1998. NASA’s data show global acreage lost to wildfire has declined 24 percent since 1998. Also, research published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research, analyzing global wildfires back to the year 1901, shows a trend of declining wildfires dating back more than 100 years. The scientists report “a notable declining rate of burned area globally.” National and international data also show no increase in the number or intensity of droughts, hurricanes, or tornadoes over the period of recent modest warming, making it impossible for Yahoo News to honestly claim climate change is making weather more extreme, because weather hasn’t been more extreme. Yahoo News may be right that four in 10 Americans were effected by extreme weather events in 2021. However, wildfires and hurricanes occur seasonally, and floods, tornadoes, and droughts impact portions of the United States every year, meaning millions of Americans are impacted by extreme weather every year. If, in 2021, an unusual number of Americans were impacted by extreme weather, it is not due to a climate induced change in weather patterns, but rather because an increasing number of people live in locations where natural disasters are common. Demographic data show a long-term trend of ever greater numbers of people moving to coastal areas prone to hurricanes and into arid, forested areas where wildfires are common, for example. More people putting themselves into harm’s way, not worsening weather, is responsible for any increase in the number of people impacted by extreme weather.

‘Gross misinformation’: Extreme weather expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. Slams New hurricane study – ‘Re-invents history by using modeled historical hurricane activity to find the right trends’

December 3, 2021

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/12/03/pielke-jr-slams-kerry-emanuels-latest/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=pielke-jr-slams-kerry-emanuels-latest Pielke Jr. Slams Kerry Emanuel’s Latest Originally tweeted by Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) on December 2, 2021. Absolutely amazing & somewhat sad Observations of hurricane activity apparently don’t show the right trends. So this new paper re-invents history by using modeled historical hurricane activity to find the right trends. Predictably, gross misinformation follows This is where we are at in hurricane research?😐 And the MIT press release fails to accurately reflect the paper Irresponsible It goes undisclosed that the author runs a consulting firm that sells modelled hurricane projections under RCP8.5 Bottom line⬇️ Originally tweeted by Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) on December 2, 2021.   Here is EurekAlert!’s release on the study. Climate modeling confirms historical records showing rise in hurricane activity New results show North Atlantic hurricanes have increased in frequency over the last 150 years. Peer-Reviewed Publication MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY When forecasting how storms may change in the future, it helps to know something about their past. Judging from historical records dating back to the 1850s, hurricanes in the North Atlantic have become more frequent over the last 150 years. However, scientists have questioned whether this upward trend is a reflection of reality, or simply an artifact of lopsided record-keeping. If 19th-century storm trackers had access to 21st-century technology, would they have recorded more storms? This inherent uncertainty has kept scientists from relying on storm records, and the patterns within them, for clues to how climate influences storms. A new MIT study published today in Nature Communications has used climate modeling, rather than storm records, to reconstruct the history of hurricanes and tropical cyclones around the world. The study finds that North Atlantic hurricanes have indeed increased in frequency over the last 150 years, similar to what historical records have shown. In particular, major hurricanes, and hurricanes in general, are more frequent today than in the past. And those that make landfall appear have grown more powerful, carrying more destructive potential. Curiously, while the North Atlantic has seen an overall increase in storm activity, the same trend was not observed in the rest of the world. The study found that the frequency of tropical cyclones globally has not changed significantly in the last 150 years. “The evidence does point, as the original historical record did, to long-term increases in North Atlantic hurricane activity, but no significant changes in global hurricane activity,” says study author Kerry Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. “It certainly will change the interpretation of climate’s effects on hurricanes — that it’s really the regionality of the climate, and that something happened to the North Atlantic that’s different from the rest of the globe. It may have been caused by global warming, which is not necessarily globally uniform.” Chance encounters The most comprehensive record of tropical cyclones is compiled in a database known as the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS). This historical record includes modern measurements from satellites and aircraft that date back to the 1940s. The database’s older records are based on reports from ships and islands that happened to be in a storm’s path. These earlier records date back to 1851, and overall the database shows an increase in North Atlantic storm activity over the last 150 years. “Nobody disagrees that that’s what the historical record shows,” Emanuel says. “On the other hand, most sensible people don’t really trust the historical record that far back in time.” Recently, scientists have used a statistical approach to identify storms that the historical record may have missed. To do so, they consulted all the digitally reconstructed shipping routes in the Atlantic over the last 150 years and mapped these routes over modern-day hurricane tracks. They then estimated the chance that a ship would encounter or entirely miss a hurricane’s presence. This analysis found a significant number of early storms were likely missed in the historical record. Accounting for these missed storms, they concluded that there was a chance that storm activity had not changed over the last 150 years. But Emanuel points out that hurricane paths in the 19th century may have looked different from today’s tracks. What’s more, the scientists may have missed key shipping routes in their analysis, as older routes have not yet been digitized. “All we know is, if there had been a change (in storm activity), it would not have been detectable, using digitized ship records,” Emanuel says “So I thought, there’s an opportunity to do better, by not using historical data at all.” Seeding storms Instead, he estimated past hurricane activity using dynamical downscaling — a technique that his group developed and has applied over the last 15 years to study climate’s effect on hurricanes. The technique starts with a coarse global climate simulation and embeds within this model a finer-resolution model that simulates features as small as hurricanes. The combined models are then fed with real-world measurements of atmospheric and ocean conditions. Emanuel then scatters the realistic simulation with hurricane “seeds” and runs the simulation forward in time to see which seeds bloom into full-blown storms. For the new study, Emanuel embedded a hurricane model into a climate “reanalysis” — a type of climate model that combines observations from the past with climate simulations to generate accurate reconstructions of past weather patterns and climate conditions. He used a particular subset of climate reanalyses that only accounts for observations collected from the surface — for instance from ships, which have recorded weather conditions and sea surface temperatures consistently since the 1850s, as opposed to from satellites, which only began systematic monitoring in the 1970s. “We chose to use this approach to avoid any artificial trends brought about by the introduction of progressively different observations,” Emanuel explains. He ran an embedded hurricane model on three different climate reanalyses, simulating tropical cyclones around the world over the past 150 years. Across all three models, he observed “unequivocal increases” in North Atlantic hurricane activity. “There’s been this quite large increase in activity in the Atlantic since the mid-19th century, which I didn’t expect to see,” Emanuel says. Within this overall rise in storm activity, he also observed a “hurricane drought” — a period during the 1970s and 80s when the number of yearly hurricanes momentarily dropped. This pause in storm activity can also be seen in historical records, and Emanuel’s group proposes a cause: sulfate aerosols, which were byproducts of fossil fuel combustion, likely set off a cascade of climate effects that cooled the North Atlantic and temporarily suppressed hurricane formation. “The general trend over the last 150 years was increasing storm activity, interrupted by this hurricane drought,” Emanuel notes. “And at this point, we’re more confident of why there was a hurricane drought than why there is an ongoing, long-term increase in activity that began in the 19th century. That is still a mystery, and it bears on the question of how global warming might affect future Atlantic hurricanes.” This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation. ### Written by Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office JOURNAL Nature Communications ARTICLE TITLE Atlantic tropical cyclones downscaled from climate reanalyses show increasing activity over past 150 years

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry: ‘We need to disabuse ourselves of the hubris that we can control Earth’s climate & prevent extreme weather events’

November 22, 2021

https://judithcurry.com/2021/11/11/the-next-environmental-crisis/ by Judith Curry Are our current solutions only a short term fix? On Monday November 15, I will be participating in an iaiLIVE debate on The Next Environmental Crisis.  … A draft of my responses is appended below: Will the new, green energy economy ushered in by governments save us from environmental disaster? For the past century, fossil fuels have been the backbone of our energy and transportation systems, providing the engine for our ever-increasing prosperity. Even without the mandate associated with global warming and other environmental issues, we would expect a natural transition away from fossil fuels over the course of the 21st century, as they become more expensive to extract and continue to contribute to geopolitical instability. The problem is with the urgency of transitioning away from fossil fuels, driven by fears about global warming.  By rapidly transitioning to this so-called clean energy economy, we’re taking a big step backwards in human development and prosperity. Nations are coming to grips with their growing over dependence on wind and solar energy.  Concerns about not meeting electricity needs this winter are resulting in a near term reliance on coal in Europe and Asia. And we ignore the environmental impacts of mining and toxic waste from solar panels and batteries, and the destruction of raptors by wind turbines. To thrive in the 21st century, the world will need much more energy. Of course we prefer our energy to be clean, as well as cheap.  To get there, we need new technologies.  The most promising right now is small modular nuclear reactors.  But there are also exciting advances in geothermal, hydrogen and others. And the technology landscape will look different even 10 years from now. For the past two decades, people have equated environmental disaster with manmade global warming.  We’ve been hearing about the climate crisis, climate catastrophe, existential threat and most recently a code red for humanity.  Note that the IPCC itself does not use the words ‘crisis’, ‘catastrophe’, or even ‘dangerous’; rather it uses the term ‘reasons for concern.’ Apart from the scientific uncertainties, the weakest part of the UN’s argument about manmade global warming is that it is dangerous. The link to danger relies on linking warming to extreme weather events, which is a tenous link at best. I have an old-fashioned view of environmental problems, focused on pollution of air, water, soils and the oceans, and also on land use that destroys habitats and diminishes species diversity. In 50 years time, we may be looking back on the UN climate policies, and this so-called green economy, as using chemotherapy to try to cure a head cold, all the while ignoring more serious diseases.   In other words, the climate crisis narrative gets in the way of real solutions to our societal and environmental problems. Theme 1: Is the environmental crisis the greatest threat that humanity faces, and if so, how do we decide this? In 2018, World Health Organization stated that “Climate change is the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century.”  From the perspective of 2021, after almost two years of fighting Covid with over 5 million deaths, this statement seems unfortunate at best.  We should be asking the question as to whether the WHO’s focus on climate change contributed to the world being ill prepared for Covid-19. Climate change is just one of many potential threats facing our world today, a point made clear by the Covid-19 pandemic. Why should climate change be prioritized over other threats? There’s a wide range of threats that we could face in the 21st century: Carrington events are solar electromagnetic storms that would take out all space-based electronics including GPS and electricity transmission lines; future pandemics; global financial collapse; a mega volcanic eruption; a cascade of mistakes that triggers a thermonuclear, biochemical or cyber war; the rise of terrorism.  It’s almost certain that we will be surprised by threats that we haven’t even imagined yet.  Vast sums spent on attempting to prevent climate change come from the same funds that effectively hold our insurance against all threats; this focus on climate change could overall increase our vulnerability to other threats. So, how do we prioritize among the threats facing humanity?  For the most part, we can’t.  The best insurance against any and all of these threats is to try to understand them, while increasing the overall resilience of our societies.  Prosperity is the best the indicator of resilience.  Resilient societies that learn from previous threats are best prepared to be anti-fragile and respond to whatever threats the future holds. Theme 2: Is relentless consumption and growth to blame for our current predicament?   I’m not sure what our current predicament actually is, other than the one manufactured by the global politics surrounding climate change.   More prosperous societies overall have a smaller impact on their environment than countries that engage in whole-scale exploitation of their environment just to survive. Environmental problems have been defined as problems of population growth.  Population increase has been enabled by technological and medical advancements.  In the early 21st century, population is growing most rapidly in less developed countries, while Japan and many countries in western Europe having fertility rates that are well below replacement.  Apart from changes in population, as countries develop, their consumption increases. Developing countries don’t just want to survive, they want to thrive. We need much more electricity, not less.  Going on an energy diet like we did in the 1970’s is off the table.  We need more electricity to support innovation and thrivability in the 21st century.   Consumption and growth will continue to increase throughout the 21st century.  We need to accept this premise, and then figure out how we can manage this growth while protecting our environment.  Theme 3: Can we rely on humanity’s ability to solve future crises of this kind? Humans are the most adaptable species that has ever existed on Planet Earth, a species so sophisticated that it can survive in outer space.  The planet has been warming for more than a century.  So far, the world has done a decent job at adapting to this change.  The yields for many crops have doubled or even quadruped since 1960. Over the past century, the number of deaths per million people from weather and climate catastrophes have dropped by 97%. Losses from global weather disasters as a percent of GDP have declined over the past 30 years. It’s an enormous challenge to minimize the environmental impact on the planet of 8 billion people.  I have no question that human ingenuity is up to the task of better providing for the needs and wants of Earth’s human inhabitants, while supporting habitats and species diversity.  But this issue is the major challenge for the next millennium.  It’s a complex challenge that extends well beyond understanding the Earth system and developing new technologies – it also includes governance and social values. To make progress on this, we need to disabuse ourselves of the hubris that we can control the Earth’s climate and prevent extreme weather events.  The urgency of transitioning from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy under the auspices of the UN agreements has sucked the oxygen from the room. There’s no space left for imagining what our 21st century infrastructure could look like, with new technologies and greater resilience to extreme weather events, or even to deal with traditional environmental problems. Under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, we’ve oversimplified a very complex problem. The causes of climate variability and change are complex, and any predictions of 21st century climate change are associated with deep uncertainty. We stand to make the overall situation worse with the simplistic solution of urgently replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar, which will have a barely noticeable impact on the climate of the 21st century. Humans do have the ability to solve future crises of this kind.  However, they also have the capacity to make things much worse by oversimplifying complex environmental issues and politicizing the science, which can lead to maladaptation and poor policy choices. JC note: You need to register (and pay) to hear this live. I understand that a youtube will be prepared of the highlights, and the full recording will eventually be made available on the iaiLive website.

WaPo: ‘How climate change & extreme weather are crimping America’s pie supply’

November 18, 2021

WaPo blames Thanksgiving pie industry shortages on… what else… global warming… vs. Joe Biden's botched handling of the pandemic and supply chain crisis. Would have been more credible to report that Pie Island was sinking, @lreiley.https://t.co/VJ3wbuxKce — Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) November 18, 2021 My first thought when reading this was "FINALLY an 11th inning climate change consequence that might matter to the American people. Praise the Lord." "How climate change and extreme weather are crimping America’s pie supply" https://t.co/L2tIw6wUSj — Merrill Markoe (@Merrillmarkoe) November 17, 2021 https://twitter.com/jtemple/status/1461037134555467776 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/11/17/holiday-pies-climate-change/ By Laura Reiley TAMPA — For months, supply chain issues and labor shortages have been putting the squeeze on Mike’s Pies, a popular commercial bakery here that’s been selling pies based off owner Mike Martin’s mother’s recipes for three decades. But another powerful factor — climate change — is heightening those challenges. Its impact is less visible but more enduring, and its consequences are playing out right as the food industry is struggling to avoid holiday season shortages. Many of the ingredients in Mike’s Pies’ pies — wheat, berries, honey, soybean oil, among numerous others — have been hit hard by climate and weather effects, including droughts, wildfires and power shutdowns around the world. That’s sending prices soaring and, combined with a scarcity of workers and other hurdles, is causing mayhem throughout the global food supply chain. “We are cutting every order that we ship; we can’t fulfill the obligations,” Martin said.For consumers, the impact on the food business means that stocks of seasonal items, from entrees to desserts, are significantly below pre-pandemic times, with meat and pies at the highest risk of being out of stock entirely, according to IRI, a global data provider for retail companies. Food prices are also way up, rising 5.1 percent in October over last year, the fastest rate in years, according to inflation data released last week by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Economists broadly expect that the labor and supply chain disruptions should work themselves out as the pandemic fades, but they say climate and weather impacts will remain major threats to food and a growing number of other industries. “There is no place to run and hide from extreme weather events,” said Michael Swanson, Wells Fargo’s chief agricultural economist. While the world’s food conglomerates and agricultural giants are acutely aware of the climate threat, near the end of the supply chain, Martin is more focused on tackling whatever crisis is front of him — regardless of the cause. “I don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring. I could walk in, and they say we can’t get boxes or we can’t get sugar,” he said. “Orders are going through the roof, prices are skyrocketing and we’re having to order way out and to order more than we’ve ever ordered.” … Honey, another critical ingredient in graham cracker crumbs, is among those products facing the most weather- and smoke-related impacts, many of which are tied directly to climate change, says Dave Gustafson, professor of biological systems engineering at Washington State University. Tim Galloway, the chief executive of Wisconsin’s Galloway Co., which supplies Mike’s Pies with sweetened condensed milk, is having his own headaches; he says climate change is in part to blame. Dairy prices spike when animal feed prices soar, so that poor wheat harvest also affects what he pays. “We’re seeing more dramatic weather shifts, [and] these factors influence dairymen in these parts of the country,” said Galloway, who buys most of his milk from Wisconsin. As input costs such as alfalfa for animal feed — this year 45 percent of alfalfa hay acreage in the United States experienced severe drought conditions — get more expensive, small, family-run Wisconsin dairies are closing. In 2019 alone, 10 percent of the state’s dairies shuttered, ceding ground to California, the nation’s top dairy state. Extreme weather has affected Galloway of Wisconsin in additional ways. One of the contract packagers the company works with was shut down for six weeks because it couldn’t get plastic bags, fallout from last winter’s polar vortex in Texas, which triggered a global plastics shortage. And then there are imports like vanilla. The spice is grown primarily in Madagascar, according to Marcel Goldenberg, head of proprietary pricing at Mintec, which is at risk of a climate change-induced famine. … The road ahead The food industry is sharply aware both of its impact on climate and its vulnerability to weather events. Agricultural companies such as ADM, Cargill and Bayer AG have pledged to work with farmers to adopt practices that will reduce atmospheric carbon and methane, and most major food conglomerates have committed to cutting their carbon footprint measurably. But as extreme weather buffets supply chains and causes ingredient shortages, often these multinational conglomerates’ own production lines are safer. Shortages and labor-related limits on production capacity force suppliers to cut off smaller customers, according to Bill Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, a consulting firm that specializes in assisting food companies with supply chain risk management. Martin is a big man, and his company is well known in pie circles. But he’s no Sara Lee. In the grand scheme of things, he’s small. On a recent day, he zips past the rows of double ovens, each of which can fit 92 pies but are currently spinning with sheet trays of chocolate cakes. There’s a 500-pound vat of pumpkin cheesecake filling, waiting for its graham cracker crusts, and behind it is a whiteboard scrawled with the day’s orders. There are 2,016 Key lime pies to Winn-Dixie, 776 Reese’s peanut pies. …

‘Deaths per disaster have gone from 782 in 1970s to 58 in 2010s. Fossil fuel-based development reduced extreme weather disaster death rate by 93%. Bad weather happens. Fossil fuels have made people safer’

September 12, 2021

Another climate alarmist fail: – Deaths per disaster have gone from 782 in the 1970s to 58 in the 2010s. – Fossil fuel-based development reduced the extreme weather disaster death rate by 93%. – Bad weather happens. Fossil fuels have made people safer.https://t.co/zH16ArbS11 — Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) September 1, 2021

‘A lie is born’: Extreme weather expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. rips media’s false claim that ‘1 in 3 Americans experienced a weather disaster this summer’ – Pielke slams ‘spectacular…quality control problems in climate journalism’

September 7, 2021

How to trick a president with poor data practices ➡️Trump issued zero statewide disaster declarations for weather/climate events 2017-2020➡️Biden has already issued 8 statewide declarations in 2021 Of course more people are covered by declarations in 2021 https://t.co/kn4iDbY15X pic.twitter.com/k5bzzM4Pl2 — The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) September 7, 2021 Did every single person in these states experience a disaster? Each of these states received a statewide disaster declaration in 2021 WAMTCAWATNMONYNE If not then this headline is wrong Pro tip: Federal Disaster Declarations reflect presidential politics + disasters pic.twitter.com/uugv8ts2xr — The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) September 7, 2021 A lie is born1-"More than 32% of Americans live in a county or state that has been declared a disaster area by FEMA"2-"Nearly 1 in 3 Americans live in a county hit by a weather disaster in the past 3 months"3-"Nearly 1 in 3 Americans experienced a weather disaster this summer" pic.twitter.com/WOABfx9k9S — The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) September 7, 2021   Climate change is real & aggressive adaptation and mitigation policies make good sense So does that mean that we can just make stuff up? I do not understand the quality control problems in climate journalism but they are spectacular — The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) September 7, 2021

Does Climate Change Cause Extreme Weather Now? A Scorching Reality Check

August 26, 2021

https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/4rUNGyamP_fbW4IFhihjMHHnycKeoCpf Does Climate Change Cause Extreme Weather Now? A Scorching Reality Check Climate Change Dispatch / 14h The Pacific Northwest was hit with a record-shattering heatwave in June, with temperatures over 35 degrees higher than normal in some places. On June 28, Portland, Ore., reached 116 degrees.Late last week the region suffered another blast of hot weather, with a high in Portland of 103 degrees. The New York Times didn’t hesitate to pronounce the region’s bouts of extreme weatherproof that the climate wasn’t just changing, but catastrophically so.To make that claim, the Times relied on a “consortium of climate experts” that calls itself World Weather Attribution, a group organized not just to attribute extreme weather events to climate change, but to do so quickly.Within days of the June heatwave, the researchers released an analysis, declaring that the torrid spell “was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”World Weather Attribution and its alarming report were trumpeted by Time magazine, touted by the NOAA website Climate.gov, and featured by CBS News, CNBC, Scientific American, CNN, the Washington Post, USAToday, and the New York Times, among others.The group’s claim that global warming was to blame was perhaps less significant than the speed with which that conclusion was provided to the media.Previous efforts to tie extreme weather events to climate change hadn’t had the impact scientists had hoped for, according to Time, because it “wasn’t producing results fast enough to get attention from people outside the climate science world.”“Being able to confidently say that a given weather disaster was caused by climate change while said event still has the world’s attention,” Time explained, approvingly, “can be an enormously useful tool to convince leaders, lawmakers, and others that climate change is a threat that must be addressed.”In other words, the value of rapid attribution is primarily political, not scientific.Inconveniently for World Weather Attribution (WWA), an atmospheric scientist with extensive knowledge of the Pacific Northwest climate was actively running weather models that accurately predicted the heatwave.Cliff Mass rejected the notion that global warming was to blame for the scorching temperatures. He calculated that global warming might have been responsible for two degrees of the near 40-degree anomaly.With or without climate change, Mass wrote, the region “still would have experienced the most severe heatwave of the past century.”Mass has no shortage of credentials relevant to the issue: A professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, he is the author of the book “The Weather of the Pacific Northwest.”Mass took on the World Weather Attribution group directly: “Unfortunately, there are serious flaws in their approach.” According to Mass, the heatwave was the result of “natural variability.”The models being used by the international group lacked the “resolution to correctly simulate critical intense, local precipitation features,” and “they generally use unrealistic greenhouse gas emissions.”The WWA issued a “rebuttal” calling Mass’ criticisms “misleading and incorrect.” But the gauntlet thrown down by Mass did seem to affect WWA’s confidence in its claims.The group, which had originally declared the heatwave would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change,” altered its tone.In subsequent public statements, it emphasized that it had merely been making “best estimates” and had presented them “with the appropriate caveats and uncertainties.”Scientists with the attribution group did not respond to questions about Mass’s criticisms posed by RealClearInvestigations.But what of the group’s basic mission, the attribution of individual weather events to climate change? Hasn’t it been a fundamental rule of discussing extreme temperatures in a given place not to conflate weather with climate?Weather, it is regularly pointed out, refers to conditions during a short time in a limited area; the climate is said to describe longer-term atmospheric patterns over large areas.When Donald Trump joked, on a cold day, that he could go for some global warming, he was chastised for confusing weather with climate.The director of Yale University’s project on climate change communication, Anthony Leiserowitz, denounced Trump’s comment as “scientifically ridiculous and demonstrably false.”“There is a fundamental difference in scale between what weather is and what climate is,” Leiserowitz added. “What’s going on in one small corner of the world at a given moment does not reflect what’s going on with the planet.”Until recently, at least, climate scientists long warned against using individual weather events to ponder the existence or otherwise of global warming.Typically, that argument is used to respond to those who might argue a spate of extreme cold is reason to doubt the planet is warming. Using individual weather events to say anything about the climate is “dangerous nonsense,” the New Scientist warned a decade ago.Perhaps, but it happens all the time now that climate advocates have found it to be an effective tool. In 2019, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago found that three-fourths of those polled said their views about climate change had been shaped by extreme weather events.Leah Sprain, in the book “Ethics and Practice in Science Communication,” says that even though it may be legitimate to make the broad claim that climate change “may result in future extreme weather,” when one tries “arguing weather patterns were caused by climate change, things get dicey.”Which creates tension: “For some communicators, the ultimate goal – mobilizing political action – warrants rhetorical use of extreme weather events.” But that makes scientists nervous, Sprain writes, because “misrepresenting science will undermine the credibility of arguments for climate change.”This is exactly what happened with the World Weather Attribution group, according to Mass: “Many of the climate attribution studies are resulting in headlines that are deceptive and result in people coming to incorrect conclusions about the relative roles of global warming and natural variability in current extreme weather,” he wrote at his blog. “Scary headlines and apocalyptic attribution studies needlessly provoke fear.”Covering the back-and-forth between the World Weather Attribution and Mass, the Seattle Times labeled the local atmosphere academic “a controversial figure.” The newspaper noted that “Mass has sometimes gotten into very public disputes with other scientists.”He has also been critical of the news media — “including the Seattle Times,” wrote the Seattle Times — for what he says is alarmist coverage of the climate. The Seattle Times did not respond to questions from RCI.The newspaper was not wrong that Mass has disagreed with his fellow climate scientists. He didn’t hesitate to take on any and all comers at the Real Climate blog. But he doesn’t think that should make him controversial.“Science is all about conflict,” Mass has said. “Somebody has an idea, and then someone else criticizes it.”Mass also counts as “controversial” because he spoke out last summer against the rioting and looting taking place nightly in Seattle.A recurring segment he had on Tacoma public radio was canceled after Mass – on his own blog, not on the radio —  likened the shattering of glass in Seattle to the shattered glass of Kristallnacht, the Nazi anti-Semitic pogrom.The blogging professor laments that atmospheric sciences have been “poisoned” by politics. “It’s damaged climate science,” he told RCI.And not just politics – Mass also says that the accepted tenets of global warming have become a sort of religion. Consider the language used, he says, such as the question of whether one “believes” in anthropogenic climate change.“You don’t believe in gravity,” he says. The religious metaphor also explains why colleagues get so bent out of shape with him, Mass says: “There’s nothing worse than an apostate priest.”Read rest at RealClearInvestigations SHAREVISIT WEBSITE

‘Boom times for modelers of climate change’: ‘Real money to be made’ – ‘Extreme weather events & mandatory disclosure rules for companies spur demand’

August 14, 2021

https://www.ft.com/content/37055f74-4c16-4e8f-a935-8bd95f84b3d4 By JOHN DIZARD Much has been made of this week’s release of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, as well as the more Wagnerian interpretations of its central findings. Yes, we face the prospect of higher surface temperatures and it may well be Twilight of the Gods for fossil producers and users depending on how you view the “high and low confidence” scenarios in the report. However, it is a bright morning for the climate modelling trade. Consultants who were rushing from one intermittent contract to another now have the prospect for billionaire partnerships. For years, climate modellers have been condescended to by the “catastrophe risk” experts. The cat risk people have made a good living developing models for insurers and reinsurers that generated odds on losses from “perils” such as tropical storms, floods or earthquakes. The insurers and their reinsurers wanted high resolution projections on regional risks to people with money. Not just for internal budgeting, but also something mildly scary to justify the premiums and their reviews by regulators. The cat risk models from companies such as RMS, AIR or Karen Clark & Co took a one- to three-year view, close to the terms of insurance contracts. When their products’ estimates did not work, they tweaked the models, added assumptions and data, and started over. The cat risk people have always been aware of the climate modellers’ efforts but tended to sneer at the profession and its work. They thought the climateers were commercially useless, obsessive, sometimes libellous and frequently lapel-grabbing lunatics. Also broke, so screw ’em. Mind you, they could be a bit harsh on each other as well. A few years go, Karen Clark, a leading cat risk expert, was quoted as saying that her colleagues’ models were “Doing brain surgery with a chain saw”. Leaving aside the faculty lounge-worthy brutality, you could see where the cat risk people were coming from. They were ginning up models with 10-metre to 100-metre resolution of activity on the earth’s surface, while the “cells” in the climate models might be 100km or 200km at the equator. Also, climate modellers would use simplifying assumptions to project multi-decadal or century-long scenarios. That would be long after the reinsurance contracts were settled (unless there was a Florida lawyer on the other side). But now the climateers and cat risk peoples’ knives have been put aside in the interest of a greater cause. There is real money to be made at last in joining forces. To begin with, while the cat riskers got the early cash from the insurers, the climateers have won the PR crown. So the cat riskers have partly rebranded themselves as “climate” experts. Moody’s announced on August 5 the acquisition of RMS, a cat model house now described as the “leader in climate and natural disaster risk”. Moody’s agreed to pay $2bn when the deal closes. The press release disclosed the previously private recent results of RMS, which has projected revenues of $320m for the year ending September 30, with $55m in operating income. RMS had long been a bit more “climatey” than its fellow cat riskers, seeking more business from those, such as governments, looking further out at the risk horizon. Robert Muir-Wood, its chief scientist, was a co-author of the 2007 IPCC report. He says of the deal: “So you are marrying climate modelling with (cat risk) loss modelling. There is increased convergence since the available computation power has increased.” OK, $2bn? Vinoth Jayakumar, of Draper Esprit, a London venture capital firm, will raise you and see you. Back in April, announcing a fundraising for Cervest, he wrote that “climate intelligence is a new $40bn market category”. Wow. Maybe one minor question, really just administrative stuff. For example, say the Securities and Exchange Commission pushes ahead with plans to mandate climate disclosures for securities issuers, how do all those US companies find the computation time and data storage to do the modelling to comply? They might try to buy in climate modellers’ services but that is assuming they are available. Some who look at the present conservative composition of the US Supreme Court might not, seeing an opportunity for legal challenge. As Muir Wood points out: “Regulation is likely to put a lot of demands on organisations to anticipate future risks. We recognise the scale of computation is increasing and so more and more will be run in the cloud.”

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