World Weather Attribution was founded in 2014 to produce research linking extreme weather events to climate change. [emphasis, links added]
That research is then funneled to mainstream media outlets, giving them what the group calls the “larger global warming context” as they cover natural disasters.
The group found a friend in Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who in 2022 announced a $10 million grant to WWA and two other organizations to “scale effective communication on the links between climate change and extreme weather.”
The Bezos Earth Fund said the money would provide the WWA an outlet to “reach the most important audience segments via trusted messengers.”
One such messenger is Bezos’s newspaper, the Washington Post, which has cited WWA research in more than 70 stories over the past three years, a Washington Free Beacon review found.
It does so uncritically, publishing the group’s non-peer-reviewed findings to suggest that climate change is to blame for recent natural disasters, including Hurricane Milton.
Nonpartisan experts in the field, however, are not so sure of WWA’s methods, portraying the group’s flashy studies as rushed, partisan, and “incomplete.”
Bezos’s funding for the group, paired with the Washington Post‘s favorable coverage of its research, raises questions about the newspaper’s declared independence from its billionaire owner.
The Post’s stories citing WWA do not acknowledge that Bezos—who purchased the paper in 2013, one year before the group’s founding—also bankrolls WWA.
“The motivation is entirely political,” Ryan Maue, the former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said of the climate group.
“I’m not sure what the scientific community’s opinion on it is, but my guess is that it has gotten along this far because of its political weight and the media attention that it is given, meaning you don’t want to be on the wrong side of this.”
Maue particularly criticized WWA’s methodology, which consists of determining the probability of a recent extreme weather event, comparing it with the probability of a similar event that occurred decades ago, and attributing the difference to climate change.
That leads to flashy findings—but not necessarily accurate ones, according to Maue, who argued that the WWA values speed over accuracy and, as such, produces “incomplete” research.
“What they are able to put out is the headline that climate change made Hurricane Helene worse and then count on the scientific illiteracy of the corporate media in order to produce headlines that become, you know, more and more outlandish, making claims that obviously are not supported by the science,” he told the Free Beacon.
“Something that’s, let’s say, a one percent chance of happening every year is now a 10 percent chance,” Maue said in an interview, noting the subjectivity of WWA’s methods. “So that’s a 1,000 percent increase. But, in actuality, you’re operating in the extreme tails of the distribution—you’re able to then discuss percent changes that are, you know, hysterically large.”
WWA research cited in the Post includes studies that blamed climate change for catastrophic worldwide floods in September, an August heat wave across the United States, and a February drought in South America’s Amazon River Basin, in addition to Hurricane Milton.
WWA concluded in its study published Friday, for example, that the hurricane’s rainfall was 20 to 30 percent heavier because of man-made climate change.
And that study was published less than 48 hours after the storm made landfall in Florida—speed is a hallmark of the group’s research, allowing it to publicize eye-popping conclusions while the weather event in question is still top-of-mind for news consumers.
“The study from the World Weather Attribution network — a team of scientists who analyze how climate change contributes to extreme weather events — found that storms as wet as Milton are twice as likely to occur because of global warming,” the Post’s report on Milton stated. “Powered by record heat in the Gulf of Mexico, the hurricane’s winds were 10 percent faster than they would have been in a world not altered by greenhouse gas emissions.”
WWA chief scientist and founder Friederike Otto, meanwhile, has openly acknowledged that her group exists in part to create evidence that can then be admissible in climate litigation, including high-stakes cases accusing oil companies of bearing financial responsibility for weather events.
The studies are used to “pressure policymakers” and are also meant to spur “companies like the major fossil fuel companies to change their business model and to do more,” Otto explained.
The group has also stated part of its mission is to cultivate support for mitigation policies, including shutting down fossil fuels.
In its September story on global floods, the Post quoted WWA researcher Joyce Kimutai, who said such weather events “will keep getting worse until we replace fossil fuels with cleaner, renewable sources of energy.”
Read rest at Free Beacon
Bezos and his circlefest of climate doom is simply a cheap carnival fortuneteller sideshow…….
The Washington Compost like the New York Slimes is totally leftists Propaganda Not Real News and the collect unearned Pultizers for their Fake News
Statistical probability is determined by using climate models that don’t work in large part because they assume the climate is controlled by CO2 and can’t model natural variability or clouds.
There is something logically suspect about assuming that CO2 controls the climate and creating computer models based on that assumption to verify the hypothesis. Isn’t that what’s called ‘begging the question’?
Where are the multi variate regression analyses of tree rings with attribution of growth due to warming vs. growth due to CO2 fertilization vs the mid-20th century cooling due to aerosols which blocked sunlight and created acid rain?
It must be more than 20 years ago that someone asked “why do some lottery winners go broke so fast?” The response was “Smarter people end up with it and always will”
Bezos is one of the smartest. He doesn’t care about planet Earth, his collection of fuel guzzling toys betrays him. There’s a sucker born every minute. Such people have fallen for climate alarmism. Bezos belongs to the P.T. Barnum elite.
You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but you can fool some of the people some of the time, and that’s enough.