Climate 'Science' is Now Pure Politics

Unable to produce actual evidence of 'extreme' weather, the IPCC resorts to 'attribution studies'

In recent years, news coverage of every extreme weather event throughout the world has included a statement of anthropogenic climate change’s alleged influence on the probability of that event occurring. These estimates that this or that flood or wildfire was made so many more times more likely by climate change invariably come from an outfit called World Weather Attribution (WWA), led by Dr Friederike Otto of Imperial College. As we have reported here before, Otto’s method, known as simply ‘attribution’, is controversial and arguably unscientific, and only of any use in generating climate fake news stories. But her work has immense political utility, and almost certainly for that reason she was this year appointed to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to lead its “detection and attribution” chapter, which, being based until now in more robust observational science and statistics, has been unable to provide the scientific certainty required to sustain the alarmist climate narrative. The inevitable criticism of that obvious political appointment has in turn yielded a response from the Green Blob: an attempt to rehabilitate the climate pseudoscience, to defend the agenda and smear the critics.

In Politico’s specialist energy and environment publication, E&E News, an article this week claims that ‘Climate critics try to discredit IPCC author for linking disasters to global warming‘. According to this story, critics’ claims that Otto’s work “aims to bolster multibillion-dollar lawsuits against oil and gas companies” is a false smear to the effect that her work is not motivated by scientific curiosity but by her attachment to the climate wars. Otto, the rebuttal to her critics argues, will be one of a number of scientists working on a chapter, who will together analyse many studies to synthesise them for its ‘Assessment Reports’, and will not be able to prejudice the process that is designed to rule out such biases.