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

by Eric Felten
August 25, 2021, 10:39 AM
in News and Opinion
Reading Time: 6 mins read
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heatwave hot city sunThe 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

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Comments 7

  1. Spurwing Plover says:
    4 years ago

    Global Warming/Climate Change making liberal Eco-Freaks act even more idiotic and silly Next on their list is turning Freeways into dumb Bike Paths

    • Drewski says:
      4 years ago

      Professor Cliff Mass is respected but in this case, he is an outlier. Many of the 27 members of the WWA have qualifications equal to or greater than his.
      In fact, Nick Bond, state climatologist and a UW professor who co-teaches a course with Mass, said the report team used accepted statistical methods for looking at these types of events. “What they show makes sense to me — that the frequency and intensity of these events is increasing — even if I wouldn’t take as gospel the exact numbers,” Bond said.

      Gavin Schmidt, senior climate adviser for NASA, in a series of tweets wrote “some folks keep getting the climate change connection wrong” and referred to Mass.

      • Gator says:
        4 years ago

        “How can anyone say with a straight face that attribution science is adding value to the conversation, when the best they can achieve is an uncertainty of 900%, and a bottom limit of no change in severity whatsoever?”

        https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/08/25/claim-climate-attribution-can-tell-how-much-we-are-to-blame-for-weather-disasters/

        LOL

  2. Tom says:
    4 years ago

    Until there is at least 1 million years of climate data, not speculation and agenda backed numbers, we don’t really know where we are in terms of climate change. These global warming morons are basing their statistics on the last 150 years or so of data, and some of that data in not necessarily accurate.

    Since it is still almost impossible for the “weatherman” to get the next day’s forecast accurate, let alone 4-5 days ahead, making predictions for the next 5, 10 or 50 years is futile. None of Goreski’s climate predictions from over 10 years ago have come to pass…and he is the grand master of climate deception and fakery.

  3. Chaamjamal says:
    4 years ago

    Climate change causes accelerated forest growth.
    https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/08/26/tree-growth-acceleration/

  4. Steve Bunten says:
    4 years ago

    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.”

    Oh that’s okay. The so-called “Climate Scientists” like Michael Mann, et al, have already done so much to undermine the credibility of human-caused climate change.

  5. Spurwing Plover says:
    4 years ago

    Sory Eco-Freaks but Backyard BBQ’s and privately owned SUV.s do not cause Global Warming/Climate Change Since eating meat and driving to work dose not effect the climate and the Earth is Not Fragile and Nature is not delicately balanced

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