Richard Jones
Part 5: Science and Politics, Climate and Weather
It was nearly forty years ago that I read that the majority of scientific research world-wide was funded entirely or partly by the US war machine, in one guise or another. I never verified the claim, but as far as I remember it was from a scientific source, not an anti-war or anti-imperial source, and I’ve never had reason to doubt it. One qualification could be that it probably was a matter of the majority of funding, not the majority of research. Of the research independent of such funding, a significant portion must have been by pharmaceutical companies, and compromised in a similar manner.
Anyone with any exposure to science will have faced the question ‘what is science?’ and one or more smug definitions waffling about hypothesis, experiment, etc. If they don’t evade it at all, they briefly acknowledge the social dimension by reference to the need for independent verification.
Since that era, US military aggression has expanded as US hegemony recedes. Funding of (supposedly) science has probably increased, but so has the fraud inherent in the system (glorified by political ‘scientists’ as pluralism) of bribery, often called lobbying, on which US Congressional decisions are made.
Then again, in the unfree ‘Free World’, the privatisation of information has undermined science to the extent that very little can be done that is not subject to impediments such as non-disclosure agreements, assignation of patent rights to people or organisations, and other interference in the free interchange of ideas and experience that is at the core of the scientific endeavour.
In this environment, it is no surprise that the publicists that dominate both sides of climate politics routinely accuse one another of whoring for interested parties. Climatists tell us that real scientists have a ‘consensus’ about climate change, and denialists are doing PR for (mostly) petrochemical interests. Denialists tend to accuse climatists of serving political rather than commercial interests. All this is misdirection as it focuses attention on who makes (or sponsors) a claim rather than the evidence for or against the claim.
As news, real or fake, is mostly served by the entertainment industry, its vendors have no interest in providing information unless it is exciting. Extreme weather events are in themselves exciting, but the climate change context adds another level of excitement. Storms in Dubai, tornadoes in the US, floods in Spain, wildfires around the world…. These all provide vicarious excitement, but linking them to global warming brings them closer to home. Could we be next?
And so, weather is reported as climate.
In April this year (2024) Dubai was hit by a dramatic storm. Predictably, the entertainment media avoided the obvious: in desert climates, where rain is unusual, the rare occurrences are often dramatic. Instead, oddly, reports from the Guardian and Reuters waffled irrelevantly about cloud seeding with their chosen experts explaining why it was irrelevant. So why, other than magician’s trompe l’œil, did it get mention? Both, however, managed to twist this weather event into a climate event.
To this end, the Guardian was characteristically scurrilous, simply making wild unfounded assertions:
“Human-caused climate breakdown is supercharging extreme weather across the world, driving more frequent and more deadly disasters from heatwaves and wildfire to floods. At least a dozen of the most serious events of the last decade would have been all but impossible without human-caused global heating.
“Extreme rainfall is more common and more intense because of human-caused climate breakdown across most of the world. This is because warmer air can hold more water vapour. It is most likely that flooding has become more frequent and severe as a result.”
Reuters was more sober, citing a meteorologist who explained the weather event as a weather event:
“A low pressure system in the upper atmosphere, coupled with low pressure at the surface had acted like a pressure ‘squeeze’ on the air, according to Esraa Alnaqbi, a senior forecaster at the UAE government’s National Centre of Meteorology.
“That squeeze, intensified by the contrast between warmer temperatures at ground level and colder temperatures higher up, created the conditions for the powerful thunderstorm, she said.
“The ‘abnormal phenomenon’ was not unexpected in April as when the season changes the pressure changes rapidly, she said, adding that climate change also likely contributed to the storm.”
The mention of climate change at the end of this explanation of a weather event is so incongruous as to suggest that it was solicited, if not spurious.
The recent floods in Valencia, Spain, led to immediate extreme pronouncements.
The Guardian: “Spain’s apocalyptic floods show two undeniable truths: the climate crisis is getting worse and Big Oil is killing us”
Euronews: “‘Climate change kills’: Spain faces new flood threat as leaders highlight extreme weather at COP29”
No attempt at all to provide evidence connecting the weather event with climate change. Evidence is irrelevant to entertainment.
A climatist site, on the other hand, has an agenda and wants to convince us, so climatecentral.org says:
“The low-pressure system driving these historic floods tapped into an atmospheric river carrying excess moisture from the unusually warm Tropical Atlantic. According to the Climate Shift Index: Ocean, these elevated sea surface temperatures were made at least 50 to 300 times more likely by human-caused climate change.”
Just as your recent lottery win was made more likely by your purchase of a ticket. Unfortunately, one of the first things you learn, or should learn, about statistics is that they can’t provide evidence of causality. Worse, this isn’t even about the probability of the Valencia event. So-called climate modelling tries to predict the future and every step in the computing involves a probability. It has no predictive value beyond that of the model that says if you throw three dice. other outcomes are 215 times more likely than three sixes. If you take them seriously, you should conclude that the Valencia floods were not surprising. Good luck with that!
Is fire more exciting than flood? I ask because, apparently, very exciting wildfires don’t generate so much need to entertain with extravagant claims about climate. According to an MSN report on US wildfires,
‘It’s not possible to say that climate change caused the fires, but the extreme conditions fuelling the fires have strong connections to the effects of climate change, according to David Robinson, the New Jersey state climatologist at Rutgers University.
‘”Human-induced climate change underpins all of our day-to-day weather,” he said.
‘It’s as if the weather foundation has been raised, he said. “The atmosphere is warmer, the oceans are warmer,” he said. If a storm comes through to trigger them then you get torrential rains. But if there’s no trigger, “you still have the increasing warmth, so it dries things out.”‘
Almost simultaneously with the takeover of the world’s worst chemical warfare criminal by the second worst, a French court fined Monsanto in relation to the cancer of an individual who had handled glyphosate. Statistics can support a proposition that a substance causes cancer, but attributing an individual case is another matter. In the same way, statistics, whether from observations or from modelling, could support the case that extreme weather events are due to climate change, but proving that for a particular event is a different proposition and I don’t think anyone has attempted it. Why bother, when the media are so ready to run with it without evidence? It’s as easy as blaming Putin for war in Ukraine.
As it is, there seems to be net zero, to coin a phrase, evidence for climate change driving extremes.
Yet the context of climate change talk makes extreme weather events more newsworthy. So, is there any doubt that we are more likely to hear exciting stories about remote events than we would have many years ago? Or that we could thus be encouraged to believe that the world is a more dangerous place, weather-wise, just as more reporting of street violence can make us believe that the streets are more dangerous?
I must mention that, regardless of statistics or computer models, storms are powered by heat. Higher temperatures in the atmosphere and the ocean surface drive evaporation, convection, condensation, and precipitation. It is very plausible that an increase in average global surface temperature leads to more precipitation. The specific weather pattern are another matter. An increase in the frequency or intensity of storms is plausible, but evidence for it seems, so far, to be lacking.
Unfortunately, for those who want to link weather events with global climate change, there is no support from the IPCC, the coordinating centre for the supposed climatist ‘scientific consensus’.
Their latest (2023) report finds, as Pielke reports, no mention of climate change causation in
River floods
Heavy precipitation and pluvial floods
Landslides
Drought (all types)
Severe wind storms
Tropical cyclones
Sand and dust storms
Heavy snowfall and ice storms
Hail
Snow avalanche
Coastal flooding
Marine heat waves
“Furthermore, the emergence of a climate change signal is not expected under the extreme RCP8.5 scenario by 2100 for any of these phenomena, except heavy precipitation and pluvial floods and that with only medium confidence. Since we know that RCP8.5 is extreme and implausible, that means that there would even less confidence in emergence under a more plausible upper bound, like RCP4.5”
Pielke has experience concerning the interaction of politics and science in regard to climate change. Early in his career as a climate scientist, he was under political pressure to tell lies for our benefit. Although he had already researched the matter, his superiors in science wanted him to lie and say that the increasing cost of US hurricanes was due to climate change. His research had concluded that higher dollar damages were due to population growth and the increased wealth of the elite.
I do hope readers will follow this last link. It gives a rare glimpse into the process by which public opinion (i.e. yours, mine, etc) is manipulated.
Labour Affairs 