You all know how I feel about the climate change bunch. I do feel like the climate has shifted a bit from where it was when I was younger. I just can’t buy the idea that humans are responsible when the climate has ebbed and flowed since before mankind walked the planet.
Photo by Javier Miranda on Unsplash
I’d love to see a real debate on the research, but we won’t get one. Instead, we’ll get, “The science is settled!”
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It’s as if we hadn’t seen so-called settled science be overridden by new data before.
Over at The Free Press, there’s an interesting piece that touches on the climate scam, though the author doesn’t seem to go that far.
Author Roger Pielke, Jr. starts by talking about the mudslide in Nepal, and an organization called World Weather Attribution releasing a damning report about how the devastation was undoubtedly the result of climate change.
Then he notes:
With this supposedly authoritative report in hand, Nepal’s government now plans to take a $20 million claim for compensation to the United Nations for loss and damage due to climate change.
WWA scientists have now repeated this sequence more than 120 times since its founding in 2014: They issue a press release and technical report after a significant weather event, and link the event to climate change. The scientists then purport to explain how much climate change has tilted the odds for such events—three times more likely, 10 times more likely, impossible without climate change, etc. The media around the world then publicize the claims, invariably without challenge.
Over the past months I have replicated 96 WWA studies . Beyond the headlines and under the hood, I can now document how the methods of the WWA project do not actually perform any legitimate analysis that would actually link the weather event to climate change. They simply assume it.
Further, applying the WWA methods I can link any measure that increases or decreases with time to climate change, whether that trend is weather-related or not. What’s more, I can replace increasing global temperatures with any other measure that is trending up or down, and show how that measure makes the weather event worse or more likely. Did increases in global patent applications make rainfall worse in a 2019 typhoon in Japan? If you use the WWA’s attribution methodology, you can “prove” it—as I did.
Shoddy methodology is a major problem with any research, and the fact that WWA wasn’t blasted from the hilltops time and time again for that methodology is troubling.
After all, this is the first time I’ve seen mention of their problems. I tend not to delve too deep into that kind of research simply because my own litmus tests is the fact that they can’t get a damn model right, so they clearly don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.
Still, it’s interesting.
Pielke then talks a bit about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC
The IPCC judgment that global average temperatures have increased (now approaching 1.5 Celsius above the period 1850 to 1900) and that it is primarily due to human influences first occurred three decades ago, and is one of the most robust conclusions across climate science.
The IPCC has applied the same detection and attribution framework to extreme weather events and produced a much shorter list of detection and/or attributed findings. In its most recent full assessment , in 2021, it reported increases in the intensity, duration, and number of heat wave days at the global scale, and increases in the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall across most land regions.
For nearly everything else, the IPCC recorded low confidence in detection, in attribution, or in both, including for river flooding, meteorological and hydrological drought, tropical cyclones, winter storms, tornadoes, hail, lightning, and extreme winds.
These conclusions have changed little across successive assessments , which is unsurprising; scientists rarely overturn the findings of many decades within a few years of measurements. But a reader of the daily news would form a very different impression of what mainstream climate science has concluded.
So what I’m getting here is that the science is anything but settled, the research here is about as bad as the research in so-called gun violence—which is what I tend to read most of—and that for all the doom and gloom, Greta Thunberg really should have stayed in school.
Most of the piece is blasting the WWA, and rightly so, but the truth of the matter is that the so-called research is being judged harshly and not holding up, yet we never really hear about that aspect. The media doesn’t report on that, only what the alarmists are screaming at the top of their lungs.
To put it another way, they’d have treated Chicken Little as an authoritative source and denounced anyone who claimed what he said was simply impossible.
And there’s money in it. There’s a lot of money in it, actually, and while grants don’t go directly to researchers’ pockets, it still keeps them gainfully employed and allows them all the bells and whistles…plus the conference and research trips to tourist destinations, and the like.
What bothers me is that we know this happens. We know the science isn’t settled. We know researchers can’t really tell you what’s happening or why. They’re missing something, and because of that, even if the temperatures are increasing, they can’t actually tell you why.
And that’s a problem because many of these researchers and their activist allies are ready to tell you to give up your car, give up meat, give up everything you are and do, just so you can live in the pod and eat the bug.
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You will own nothing and be happy.
Except you won’t be. You’ll never be happy unless you’re free to chart your own path. Even that doesn’t guarantee happiness, which is why our forefathers defended the pursuit of it, not the acquisition.
You can't just will people into happiness, and you can’t destroy all they know and expect them to be quiet about it, especially when we can look at the evidence, too, and know things like the models’ track record, among other things.
In short, you can’t keep pissing on people’s legs and expect them to keep on buying that it’s raining…
…unless your buddies in the media run cover for you.
There is a scam going on, and it’s using the threat of extinction to push an agenda that would coincidentally build the socialist Utopia many leftists dream of.
Funny, that.
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