Worse than the worst thing ever
The orthodox view is that 2024 had the worst weather ever, and never mind that silly old data.
Thus Euronews.green says “From destruction to deadly heat, photojournalists capture the reality of climate change in 2024”. Destruction, no less. And they took lots of photos so if the world ended and no one noticed they can show you later.
The Guardian opines “What is the real toll of natural and climate disasters? Science has staggering new answers”.
Flipboard meanwhile staggers to an Associated Press feature “AP PHOTOS: Hallmarks of climate change seen in floods, fires and drought around the globe”. And Canada’s ministry of Environment and Climate Change, Climate Change and Climate Change hollered:
“Canadians are increasingly experiencing record-breaking extreme weather that threatens our homes and livelihoods, make groceries more expensive, harm our personal health, drive up insurance rates, and impose significant costs across the supply chains of our economy.”
Yup. Never mind bad economic policy, inflation is caused by climate change. Just like all the bad weather that… um… isn’t happening according to actual data.
The AP story insists that:
“The hallmarks of climate change – extreme heat and drought; larger, more intense wildfires and supercharged hurricanes, typhoons and rainstorms that lead to catastrophic flooding – are being seen and felt around the globe.”
So it’s pretty much anything. Or nothing. Because if all this stuff is being “felt around the globe” it should be fairly easy to catalogue it and they don’t.
As we have observed on many occasions, an odd thing about climate alarmism is its extreme flexibility as to whether the devastating effects of man-made global warming or thingy will shortly assail us, are just hitting now, or have been here for decades.
It depends on the phenomenon in question or the mood of the alarmist apparently. Thus glaciers have been in retreat for decades so man has been warming the planet since, say, the mid-20th century (or indeed the mid-18th, if you want to get all picky.)
As for cyclones, see the 2nd “Science Notes” item in this week’s blog entries. And the IPCC worries that some of this stuff might be going to happen. But these people talk as though it is currently happening, just started, has been going on for quite some time and is about to hit with redoubled fury.
For instance, from the cosmic awareness file, The Economist took it upon itself to explain “Why water and climate are inseparable”.
To which the simple answer is well duh because there’s water everywhere on Earth except way down under the rocks where nothing lives. And the piece then stumbles quite badly:
“Rising temperatures do more than make the world hotter. Widespread weather impacts are one of the reasons why scientists prefer the term ‘climate change’ to ‘global warming’.
But it can be hard to grasp just how connected the climate and the water cycle are, and to untangle the complex web of interactions between them. In school, children learn a simplified version of the Earth’s vital machinery”.
Yeah, the version in which everything is bad, getting worse and going up in flames.
If only the part about how complex it is was taught in schools rather than the simpleton version of a tight relationship between CO2 and temperature found virtually nowhere in the historical and prehistoric record but everywhere in the pages of news publications.
And another thing. The author, their “Environment editor”, Rachel Dobbs, writes that:
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change describes rising temperatures as ‘intensifying’ the water cycle, heightening its extremes and making the swings between them more erratic. Storms and rainfall become heavier and more destructive, droughts last longer and are more severe.”
Except they don’t. There is no evidence of any such secular trend where everything bad gets worse (for instance “Flooding from tides and storms disrupts sewage and drinking systems, spreading waterborne pathogens that are already replicating faster because of warmer temperatures”), or these specific things do.
Likewise, when Euronews.green asked in the fall “Why is Europe experiencing such extremes in its weather and what can be done?” they made no effort to argue, or demonstrate, that it was happening. Instead you got the usual argument by cliché:
“Experts warn that European leaders need to address the concerning trends in weather across the continent – and fast.”
The concerning trends being, basically, that there was weather:
“In the north of the continent, temperatures have been far below average, with significantly more rain than normal, while the south is battling heat waves and wildfires.”
And if the north were experiencing heat and the south cold and wet, would they say that too was climate change? Of course they would, but a theory that predicts everything predicts nothing.
They then threw in the kitchen sink, if blaming cold on warming didn’t already constitute an entire kitchen, mentioning an anomalous hot patch in the North Atlantic the computer models can’t explain, and a supposed global temperature record based on comparing things we don’t really know from this year with ones we don’t know at all from a century ago, an alleged heat wave in Antarctica that skewed the overall temperature except it was interpolations not measurements, and a poll saying tourists were afraid of climate change.
But in any case, even if you believe that 2024 was the hottest year ever since the last one that was hotter, by some tiny fraction of a degree, and that people telling pollsters things is science, what’s this guff about weather extremes?
As Roger Pielke Jr. asked this summer:
“why it is that the scientific assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are so different than what is reported in the media, proclaimed in policy, and promoted by the most public-facing climate experts. And, why can’t that gap be closed?”
Clearly one reason is that the sorts of people who get to be “Environment editor” at once-reputable publications not only don’t read contrarians like RPJ, they also don’t actually read IPCC reports, just what someone else who also didn’t read them claims they must have contained. If they had, they’d know that as he also wrote back in July of 2024:
“Everyone knows that in recent years climate change has fueled floods, storms, and drought, making them much more common and intense. For instance, a 2023 Pew Research poll found that 84% of Americans believed that climate change had contributed to worsening floods, storms, or drought in their local communities.
The widespread public belief in climate change as a cause of the weather events that we experience and see on social media is nowadays conventional wisdom. It is a fact so obvious that it barely needs to be supported at all. As renowned climate scientist Michael Mann explains, the detection of climate change is as simple as ‘turn on the television, read the newspaper or look out the window to see what is increasingly obvious to many.’”
Except it’s not. Pielke Jr. continued in that piece:
“According to the IPCC, we cannot in fact simply ‘look out the window’ and observe climate change – even for video-friendly hurricanes, floods, and drought. In fact, the IPCC currently concludes that we will not this century be able to detect with high confidence changes in the statistics of most weather events beyond internal variability – and this holds even if the world were to follow a projected implausible RCP8.5 future.”
So the people now writing popular journalism on climate, and much more besides, are making claims completely at odds with the science and the data. And remember that, in this case, it’s not a matter of the IPCC’s data saying one thing that Dobbs relies on, and someone else’s data saying something else.
Dobbs cites the IPCC, or waves her arms at it, in support of claims it does not make, that it has been explained that it does not make, and she missed it or didn’t care.
As for photo-friendly wildfires, there’s pretty good evidence that the world had a lot more of them a quarter-millennium ago, and that they’ve been declining in the U.S. and globally in recent decades.
Speaking of being ahistorical, the Guardian piece argues that natural disasters don’t just kill people in the short run, they have long-lasting impacts on mortality… which is probably true but almost certainly didn’t become true in 1988 or whenever man-made climate change hit, so using it to intensify panic over the climate crisis is illegitimate. And that Euronews.green piece we led off with blares:
“After heat records were smashed and a torrent of extreme weather events rocked countless countries in 2023, some climate scientists believed that the end of the El Nino weather pattern meant 2024 would be slightly cooler. It didn’t happen that way. This year is expected to break 2023’s global average temperature record and the effects of the warming – more powerful hurricanes, floods, wildfires and suffocating heat – have upended lives and livelihoods.”
So they’re reporting a temperature result that didn’t even happen yet to explain extreme weather that also didn’t happen.
Unfortunately climate journalists like Dobbs don’t look at data, not even second-hand apparently. She just goes with what everybody knows because they heard it from people like her who wrote it because everybody knows because they heard it from people like her. (And maybe just as well; back in January 2024 The Economist offered “Eight charts illustrate 2023’s extreme weather” six of which were about temperature, another purported to show “Forcings contributing to global temperature change, °C”, a calculation not a measurement, and one of which showed that Arctic sea ice in 2023 was above the 1979-89 at several points in the fall, meaning not one single one showed extreme weather. Why would you when everybody knows?
The result is a weird mishmash of science and politics, current reality and green dreams. As in Dobbs’ claim that:
“Where water is a source of renewable energy – such as the hydroelectric dams and reservoirs meant to provide 15% of California’s electricity – dwindling levels can force grids back to fossil fuels.”
Except they were only “meant to” in the minds of people who have shown themselves appallingly bad at planning energy systems. Which isn’t proof of climate breakdown but of zealots miscalculating. Though it is true that they had water in their brains. But if everything is connected to everything 68 different ways, how can we test the theory?
Other than the bit where the theory describes things that aren’t happening then predicts ones that don’t.
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