The Day After Tomorrow Part XXXVIII

The perennial ‘AMOC shutdown’ climate alarmist scare has had more outings than Rocky Balboa. This is just the latest in a long line of ‘new study’/’experts say’ scares on the global thermohaline circulation, which come along about once every six months on average:

Ironically, back in November, the Royal Society was debunking the Gulf Steam collapse scare. I wrote about it here:

It’s Worse Than We Thought: ‘Gulf Stream Collapse Debunked’ Becomes ‘AMOC Ate My Global Warming’ Which Becomes ‘AMOC IS My Global Warming!’

Jaime Jessop

16 November 2023

It's Worse Than We Thought: 'Gulf Stream Collapse Debunked' Becomes 'AMOC Ate My Global Warming' Which Becomes 'AMOC IS My Global Warming!'

The Daily Sceptic has the following article on the perennial climate alarmist favourite ‘Day After Tomorrow’ scenario, i.e. the collapse of the Gulf Stream due to global warming resulting in . . . . . northern Europe freezing. Chris Morrison quotes the conclusion of a Royal Society study which says:

Read full story

But normal service has obviously been resumed with the latest media hype about the latest study. In November I said:

Climate crisis zealots just love regaling us with grim fairy tales of imminent catastrophic AMOC collapse due to global warming supposedly melting the Greenland icecap, thus diluting the cold north Atlantic oceans with trillions of gallons of fresh water, effectively preventing the dense salty water sinking to depths and so shutting down the ‘conveyor belt’. If telling us that the sinful burning of fossil fuels will alternately or simultaneously drown, drench, parch, starve, boil, or incinerate us is their day job, then warning that AMOC collapse will freeze the nuts off our brass monkeys is definitely the full time hobby carried out during holidays and lunch breaks.

It came to a head a few years ago when two papers were published in 2018 warning us of a potential ‘catastrophic’ slow down in AMOC which began after 1950 and was predicted to get worse over the 21st century, supposedly because of human emissions of greenhouse gases. I covered those two studies and the inevitable MSM scaremongering hysteria here.

The Royal Society found that natural internal variability may dominate the observed AMOC trend since 1950 (direct observations only since 2004) and therefore any model projections based on the observed trend, which fail to adequately account for internal variability, must be considered to be highly uncertain. As Chris Morrison at the Daily Sceptic pointed out:

The Royal Society authors find that the climate models that are stuck with an assumption that humans can and do control the AMOC have been wrong for decades. Neither past nor current models are successful in representing actual AMOC observational data. They go on to add: “If it is not possible to reconcile climate models and observations of the AMOC in the historical period, then we believe the statement about future confidence about AMOC evolution should be revised. Low confidence in the past should mean lower confidence in the future.”

Many of the scare tactics employed by mainstream media and green activists are given weight by the IPCC’s suggestion that the AMOC will weaken in future as “very likely”. But the authors note the models cannot reproduce past variations, causing them rightly to ask why we should be confident about their ability to predict the future. The challenge for the AMOC community is either to reconcile the differences between climate models and observations or to better understand the reasons for deviation. “We believe that progress needs to be made in understanding why models do not reproduce past AMOC variability and that this is the key to having confidence in the future evolution of this key climate variable,” they state.

As I pointed out in November:

So the models are not ‘wrong’, they’re just not fit for the purpose of simulating past and future climate change and thus informing climate policy, precisely because they do not accurately simulate natural internal variability which is large over decadal and multidecadal reference periods compared to external forcing. We’ve been conned by bad science allied with political activism and corporate vested interests.

Just four months later and we have a new AMOC scare-story based on just one model telling us that we’re all going to freeze to death very suddenly, Hollywood style, à la ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ because the ‘signs are’ that we are fast approaching an ‘OMG we’re all going to die tipping point’. Take it away Mr Guardianista journalist:

The circulation of the Atlantic Ocean is heading towards a tipping point that is “bad news for the climate system and humanity”, a study has found.

The scientists behind the research said they were shocked at the forecast speed of collapse once the point is reached, although they said it was not yet possible to predict how soon that would happen.

Using computer models and past data, the researchers developed an early warning indicator for the breakdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), a vast system of ocean currents that is a key component in global climate regulation.

They found Amoc is already on track towards an abrupt shift, which has not happened for more than 10,000 years and would have dire implications for large parts of the world.

“What surprised us was the rate at which tipping occurs,” said the paper’s lead author, René van Westen, of Utrecht University. “It will be devastating.”

He said there was not yet enough data to say whether this would occur in the next year or in the coming century, but when it happens, the changes are irreversible on human timescales.

In the meantime, the direction of travel is undoubtedly in an alarming direction.

“We are moving towards it. That is kind of scary,” van Westen said. “We need to take climate change much more seriously.”

Fear porn – on scientific ‘authority’. You’re meant to suck it up and start to behave not like a free-range, free-thinking human being, but like a Net Zero compliant automaton, in order to avoid this catastrophe. So let’s take a look at what the actual paper says, and whether, or not, it lives up to the Guardian’s hype (and the hype of its lead author).

. . . . . . there is strong need for a more physics-based, observable, and reliable early warning indicator that characterizes the AMOC tipping point.

To develop such an early warning indicator, we performed a targeted simulation to find an AMOC tipping event in the Community Earth System Model (CESM; version 1.0.5). This CESM version, which has been used in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), phase 5, has horizontal resolutions of 1° for the ocean/sea ice and 2° for the atmosphere/land components (see Materials and Methods).

We start from a statistical equilibrium solution of a preindustrial control simulation (16) and keep greenhouse gas and solar and aerosol forcings constant to preindustrial levels during the simulation.

This tells us immediately that the model simlation is a highly artificial one: it keeps natural solar and aerosol (volcanic) emissions constant and even neglects to include GHG forcings. So basically, no external forcings on climate, meaning no global warming. The only variable is freshwater flux into the Atlantic. Even so, it took 6 months running on a mainframe computer to generate the results, which was very expensive and not repeatable.

A quasi-equilibrium approach (17–19) is followed by adding a slowly varying freshwater flux anomaly F_H in the North Atlantic over the region between latitudes 20°N and 50°N. This freshwater flux anomaly is compensated over the rest of the domain, as shown in the inset of Fig. 1A. We linearly increased the freshwater flux forcing with a rate of 3 × 10⁻⁴ Sv year⁻¹ until model year 2200, where a maximum of F_H = 0.66 Sv is reached. Such a simulation has not been conducted before with a complex global climate model (GCM) (i.e., used in CMIP5 and beyond) as the CESM version used here because of the high computational costs and it cannot easily be repeated for a suite of different GCMs.

A requirement of sound science is that it must be repeatable. This model experiment is not.

Under increasing freshwater forcing, we find a gradual decrease (Fig. 1A) in the AMOC strength (see Materials and Methods). Natural variability dominates the AMOC strength in the first 400 years; however, after model year 800, a clear negative trend appears because of the increasing freshwater forcing. Then, after 1750 years of model integration, we find an abrupt AMOC collapse (fig. S1, A and B). The AMOC strength is about 10 Sv in model year 1750 and decreases to 2 Sv 100 years later (model year 1850) and eventually becomes slightly negative after model year 2000. Such a transient AMOC response (model years 1750 to 1850) is spectacular considering the slow change in the freshwater forcing (i.e., ∆F_H = 0.03 Sv). The characteristic meridional overturning circulation and associated northward heat transport in the Atlantic Ocean have decreased to nearly zero and by 75% (at 26°N), respectively, after model year 2000 (Fig. 1, B to D, and fig. S2A).

So the tipping point they found is 1750 years from now, assuming a constant flux of fresh water into the ocean from ice melt. That would be the year 3774 AD! So, not really the day after tomorrow then! Also, this freshwater flux is not realistic given present day conditions. Even though it is modest by the standards of other freshwater flux model experiments which have been done to investigate AMOC collapse, it is still very high:

In the CESM simulation here, AMOC tipping occurs at relatively large values of the freshwater forcing. This is due to biases in precipitation elsewhere in the models and mainly over the Indian Ocean (37). Hence, we needed to integrate the CESM to rather large values of the freshwater forcing [∼0.6 Sv, about a factor 80 times larger than the present-day melt rate of the Greenland Ice Sheet (55)] to find the AMOC tipping event. The effect of the biases can be seen from the value of the AMOC-induced freshwater transport at 34°S, F_ovS, which is positive at the start of the simulation. When biases are corrected in the CESM, it is expected that the AMOC tipping is expected to occur at smaller values of the freshwater forcing.

The authors argue that they had to make the freshwater flux unrealistically high to account for biases in the climate models which estimate the freshwater transport at 34S to be positive, whereas observational estimates generally tend to find it to be negative at present. This is the equivalent of saying we put dodgy data into our models to compensate for the fact that the models don’t simulate reality too well!

The claim in the Guardian is this:

They found Amoc is already on track towards an abrupt shift, which has not happened for more than 10,000 years and would have dire implications for large parts of the world.

The basis of this claim is the identification of a signal in the southern hemisphere, at the boundary of the Atlantic, which supposedly indicates whether AMOC is stable or not. This is the freshwater flux measured at 34S, first proposed as an indicator of AMOC stability by Stefan Rahmstorf in 1996. The authors say:

From idealized ocean-climate models, it has been suggested that the freshwater transport of the AMOC at 34°S, indicated by F_ovS (see Materials and Methods), is an important indicator of AMOC stability (29–33). The reason is that this quantity is a measure of the salt-advection feedback strength, thought crucial in AMOC tipping. This feedback describes the amplification of a freshwater perturbation in the North Atlantic through a weakening of the AMOC, which leads to less northward salt transport and, hence, amplification of the initial freshwater perturbation (34, 35).

They explain again why this figure is initially positive in the model run because of ‘well known’ biases in the models:

In the CESM results here (Fig. 4A), F_ovS is positive at the beginning of the simulation, which indicates that the AMOC exports net salinity (with respect to reference salinity of 35 g kg⁻¹) out of the Atlantic. This is not in agreement with observations (36, 37), which is a well-known bias in CMIP phase 3 (38), phase 5 (21), and phase 6 (37) models. In the CMIP phase 6 (CMIP6) models, this bias is mainly due to large biases (compared to observations) in the freshwater flux over the Indian Ocean (37).

There are no direct observations of freshwater flux at 34S, only estimates and reanalysis products (models). Nevertheless, they tend to point towards F_ovS being negative.

Note that there is a large variation in the trend between different products, not all show a negative trend and the datasets are short. Hence I find this statement by the authors to be somewhat suspect:

The historical F_ovS, derived from reanalysis and assimilation products (Fig. 6A), are consistent in the sign of F_ovS when comparing those to direct observations (36, 42). The reanalysis product mean shows a robust and significant negative F_ovS trend (of −1.20 mSv year⁻¹) over the past 40 years (Fig. 6B), and its magnitude is close to the projected CMIP6 mean trend [of −1.06 mSv year⁻¹, 2000–2100 (37)] under a high-end climate change scenario. This multi-reanalysis mean negative trend suggests that the AMOC is on course to tipping as a more negative F_ovS is associated with a stronger salt-advection feedback.

The freshwater flux at 34S may not even be the best indicator of AMOC stability anyway. Here for instance:

The value of F_ovS at 34°S is often considered an indicator for AMOC bi-stability with a negative value indicating a bistable AMOC and positive values indicating a monostable AMOC. However, no rigorous proof for it’s relation with AMOC bi-stability exists.

Also here:

In a recent freshwater hosing experiment in a climate model with an eddy-permitting ocean component, the change in the gyre freshwater transport across 33° S is larger than the AMOC freshwater transport change. This casts very strong doubt on the usefulness of this simple AMOC stability criterion. If a climate model uses large surface flux adjustments, then these adjustments can interfere with the atmosphere–ocean feedbacks, and strongly change the AMOC stability properties.

As usual, the actual science is very complex, with lots of unknowns and uncertainties, but the media runs with a storyline which implies that it is definitive and as a result we should be afraid, be very afraid. And of course all the usual climate apocalypse nutters jump on the ‘latest science’ immediately:

At Last! Met Office Have A Named Storm! . . . . . Except They Stole It From The Danish Meteorological Institute!

The UK Meteorological Office are so desperate for a named storm this winter that they’ve stolen one from the Danes! Hilarious.

“A low-pressure system which will bring high winds and rain to parts of the UK has been named Storm Otto by the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI).

Storm Otto will move east across the far north of the UK from the early hours of Friday morning, likely bringing gusts in excess of 75mph to some northern areas.

Met Office Chief Meteorologist Andy Page said: “Storm Otto will bring high winds and rain to the UK, with some northern parts of Scotland and the northeast of England likely to get the strongest gusts of wind, possibly in excess of 75mph. Warnings have been issued and could be updated as Storm Otto develops.

#StormOtto, has been named by the Danish Meteorological Institute @dmidk

This is our first named storm of the season and is forecast to bring very strong winds to Scotland on Friday

Stay #WeatherAware ⚠️ pic.twitter.com/jOtCsvxBh6
— Met Office (@metoffice) February 16, 2023

Hahaha. It’s going to get a bit windy in parts of northern Scotland and northeast England. Better secure your garden furniture. This never happened before we changed the climate.

Even funnier. The Danes named it Otto: after Friederike Otto, the world famous Imperial College extreme weather attributor who hypes all kinds of bad weather as evidence of man-made climate change? Too funny.

Climate & Covid: Challenging Unenlightenment ‘Science’

Extreme Weather Attribution Pseudoscience – Meet The Imperial College Scientist Who “Peers Into The Dark Center” Of ‘Climate Disasters’

In 2016, I wrote about ‘Fredi’ Otto et al’s recently invented ‘Dark Art’ of rapid extreme weather attribution here. Six years later she’s still at it, gazing into the ‘dark center’ of extreme weather events, using her pseudoscientific dark arts in order to do so…

2 months ago · 14 likes · 10 comments · Jaime Jessop

The Beeb will be jumping for joy.

Climate & Covid: Challenging Unenlightenment ‘Science’

BBC Laments The Lack Of Destructive And Lethal Storms This Winter

It’s now February and the climate catastrophists at the BBC have not so far been able to report on any really damaging storms which have hit the UK. All they’ve had so far is a very frosty, settled spell of weather back in December, which even the climastrologists have a hard time linking to global warming. But wet, wild and windy storms are different: …

12 days ago · 14 likes · 17 comments · Jaime Jessop

SAVE CROSS-POST

Mission Impossible: Attributing The Pacific Northwest Heatwave To Climate Change

Before I get to the mission ‘impossible’ I want to highlight another recent study which demonstrated just how extremely unlikely/impossible the maximum daytime temperatures recorded during the North West Pacific heatwave of 2021 were, if one assumes that the sole/primary driver of the conditions was ‘climate change’, i.e. the long term warming trend observed since 1950 or even 1850, depending on which temperature datasets are used.

Here is what that paper says:

Here, we identify and draw on the strong relationship between the climatological higher-order statistics of temperature (skewness and kurtosis) and the magnitude of extreme events to quantify the likelihood of comparable events using a large climate model ensemble (Community Earth System Model version 2 Large Ensemble [CESM2-LE]). In general, CESM2 can simulate temperature anomalies as extreme as those observed in 2021, but they are rare: temperature anomalies that exceed 4.5σ occur with an approximate frequency of one in a hundred thousand years.

Even using a ‘very hot’ climate model with an extraordinarily high climate sensitivity of 5.3C, these researchers could still only simulate the heatwave as a 1 in a 100,000 year event! In other words, they found that it was basically impossible, or, to put it more eloquently, it was a 5 sigma ‘Black Swan’ event which could not be linked to climate change.

The authors inform us as to the meteorological proximal cause of the extraordinary heatwave:

The proximal, meteorological causes of the heatwave are relatively clear. Around June 20th, a circulation anomaly developed in the western subtropical Pacific due to convection associated with the East Asian monsoon system (Qian et al., 2022). This perturbation seeded a Rossby wave train, which propagated eastward along a midlatitude wave guide, and modified the upper tropospheric winds associated with the wave guide as it progressed. By June 25th, an omega-block had developed over the PNW, which progressed eastward and intensified over the course of the heatwave (Neal et al., 2022; Philip et al., 2021). A cross-Pacific atmospheric river also transported latent heat into the region (Mo et al., 2022). The block caused an extended period of clear skies, increased solar radiation at the surface, and subsidence, all of which increased temperatures. Further, downslope winds from the Cascades and other mountain ranges were reported (Philip et al., 2021), causing additional heating. Similar causal factors have previously been identified for PNW heatwaves in general (Bumbaco et al., 2013; Qian et al., 2022); the difference for this heatwave was with respect to magnitude. The geopotential height anomalies associated with the omega-block were found to exceed those in any prior heatwaves within the period of the ERA5 record (Philip et al., 2021), and daily maximum temperatures at some locations exceeded prior records by 5–6°C (Overland, 2021; Philip et al., 2021).

The authors then tell us how this heatwave was intensified by a general summertime warming of the area in line with a more general warming of the planet (allegedly due to human influence):

The meteorological causal factors for the heatwave occurred on top of a changing mean state due to human influence on the climate system. Summertime daily maximum temperatures in the PNW have increased by 0.24°C per decade since 1960 (based on Berkeley Earth data; Rohde et al., 2013), or about 1.5°C in total over that period. Changes in the mean state alone will increase the probability, intensity, and duration of heat waves (Meehl & Tebaldi, 2004); this shift is a well-understood consequence of climate change. However, the magnitude of the temperatures during the PNW heatwave have raised the question of whether the probability of very extreme events is changing faster than would be predicted by a change in the mean. This hypothesis is not supported by a prior analysis of trends in the 50th and 95th percentiles of station data during peak summer from 1980 to 2015 (McKinnon et al., 2016), but results could differ for the most extreme events, and/or for the early summer period during which the PNW heatwave occurred. Similarly, Philip et al. (2021) did not find evidence of dynamical changes in climate models that would lead to increased probability of very hot extremes, but intriguingly also found that a nonstationary generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution fit to data through 2020 (i.e., not including the 2021 event) predicted that the probability of the 2021 event was zero (Philip et al., 2021). Could this result suggest that the 2021 event was truly drawn from a different distribution?

It is pointed out that daily maximum extremes increase along with the increase in the mean but there was no evidence to suggest that extreme high temperatures were increasing faster. It is also pointed out again that the probability of the 2021 PNW heatwave is zero, after applying a statistical GEV analysis. So, the super hot climate model predicts that the observed event might be expected to happen just once in a hundred thousand years and the statistical analysis concludes that the event was statistically impossible. But of course it happened. Ergo, we must conclude that it was in fact a ‘Black Swan’ or some other factors – such as land use changes, urbanisation, changes in meteorological dynamics, temperature corruption due to poor siting of stations – singularly, or in combination, caused the observed heatwave. The authors opt for the ‘Black Swan’ or ‘bad luck’ explanation:

Assuming a similar event does not occur in the near future, and without a clear physical link to climate change, the most likely explanation remains that the weather event itself was “bad luck.” While climate change added additional warming to the picture (approximately 1.5°C since 1960), the event would have been severe even without the climate change signal

Obviously, this conclusion will not sit well at all with the climate cultists, whose Mission Impossible is to link all such extreme heatwaves to climate change, even when they are impossible!

Enter our intrepid and oddly named trio from Columbia University, NY: Samuel Bartusek, Kai Kornhuber, and Mingfang Ting!

Even as global warming increases the severity and frequency of heatwaves, the magnitude of this event exceeded what many may have considered plausible under current climate conditions. While heat records are typically broken by small increments, this event shattered records by tens of degrees Celsius. Such an unprecedented event raises the pressing question of whether future projections of heat extremes are too conservative or their mechanisms inadequately captured by climate models. It is therefore important to understand the physical drivers of the event and assess their connections with climate change.

You see what they did there? They didn’t say ‘assess their possible connections with climate change. They anticipate the results of their own study even before presenting it. This sentence tells us that they will find a link to climate change – and they do, of course. The authors here, as in the previous study above, also outline the proximate causes, specifying atmospheric dynamics, plus dry soil:

The proximate causes of the heatwave were extreme anomalies in common heatwave drivers—high geopotential height (resulting from wave–wave interaction; Extended Data Fig. 1) and dry soil, which both exceeded their historical (1979–2020) ranges yet largely followed expected bivariate distribution relationships (Fig. 2a–c), as in simulated record-shattering heatwaves in similar regions. However, the peak temperatures of the heatwave markedly exceeded the linear regressions of temperature against geopotential height or soil moisture (by 4–5 °C), which are otherwise strongly predictive (Fig. 2a,b).

But even geopotential height (atmospheric pressure basically) and soil aridity fail to explain the severity of the observed event. So the authors conclude that there must be some non-linear drivers at work:

A multiple regression incorporating their simultaneous anomalies, confirms nonlinear temperature amplification maximizing during the peak of the event at ~3 °C (increasing ~7 °C by ~40%), an ~3σ amplification (Fig. 2c,d). Temporally, this amplification term behaved out-of-phase with geopotential height but in-phase with soil moisture (it increased as soils continued to dry despite declining geopotential height; Figs. 2d and 1d and Supplementary Fig. 4), raising the possibility that two-way soil moisture–temperature interactions contributed to these nonlinearities.

So, the authors are suggesting/stating that the event at its peak was amplified 3σ (from a 2σ event to a 5σ ‘Black Swan’ event) by soil moisture-atmosphere interactions. That’s their theory, which then allows them to claim that climate change contributed very significantly to the ‘impossible’ temperatures via the alleged long term impact of drying soils in the region. But they do at least acknowledge that atmospheric dynamics played an “important role” in the event.

A wavenumber-4 upper atmospheric circulation anomaly (Methods) was established since 19 June (before the heatwave) and strongly amplified (>1.5σ ) since 21 June (Fig. 1d and Extended Data Fig. 1). Accordingly, in late June the jet stream assumed a persistent ‘wavy’ configuration with strong meridional wind meanders (Extended Data Fig. 1 and Supplementary Fig. 2)—exhibiting a zonal-mean wind and temperature fingerprint for amplified planetary scale waves that some evidence suggests may become more frequent with warming. Further, convection in the western subtropical Pacific may have helped excite a late-June Rossby wavetrain extending towards North America that locked phase with the existing hemispheric wave, amplifying the geopotential height and temperature anomalies in the PNW and perhaps also strengthening the hemispheric wave (Extended Data Fig. 1), suggesting an important role for atmospheric dynamics in this event.

But, they claim that soil moisture anomalies caused by long term warming (climate change) amplified the heatwave into ‘impossible’ territory.

This substantiates that, in addition to other processes, land–atmosphere interactions probably amplified the heating, especially where and when it was strongest (Extended Data Fig. 5), although further analysis is needed to link 850 hPa-level behaviour directly to surface processes. Meanwhile, many of the most extreme areas that plausibly experience land–atmosphere temperature amplification have experienced multi-decadal summer drying, warming and increasing temperature variability (Extended Data Fig. 6; Conclusions).

Furthermore, ongoing trends favour the nonlinear regional-mean behaviour amplifying this heatwave—thus, while the extreme heat of 2021 was unprecedented, it was nevertheless mechanistically linked to historical regional climate change.

This of course ignores the impact of changing land use on soil moisture trends, it ignores the probable influence of creeping urbanisation on recent (post 1960) warming trends and it ignores the influence of multidecadal natural variability affecting the Pacific Northwest region.

They used a model to assess the importance of land-atmosphere interactions upon extreme high temperatures.

Using a model experiment tailored to evaluate the role of soil moisture in climate, we determine that in the PNW, soil moisture–atmosphere interactions probably make monthly scale temperature extremes of the magnitude of June 2021 many times more likely.

Then what they do is construct a statistical generalised extreme value curve using the output from the model, rather than observations. Furthermore, they don’t use global mean surface temperature to ‘shift’ the distribution upwards, they use PNW mean surface temperature, which we might expect to be more significantly influenced by localised natural variability over the period in question, but which is nevertheless automatically attributed to ‘climate change’!

Consequently, the likelihood of the standardized temperature anomaly of June 2021 dramatically increases when soil moisture can interact with the atmosphere. We fit generalized extreme value (GEV) distributions to the yearly ensemble-maximum June mean temperature anomaly (Methods) of each ensemble, with their location parameters non-stationary in 5-year-smoothed annual PNW-mean surface temperature (PNWMST). We use PNWMST as a covariate instead of global mean surface temperature (GMST) to account for differing PNW-mean climate responses to global temperature between model configurations. Estimated empirical return periods are overlaid on the model curves, with each datapoint shifted in temperature by the dependence of the GEV location parameter on PNWMST. Fits and datapoints for each ensemble can thus be compared at a consistent baseline: at the observed PNWMST level of 2020, the GEV models estimate a ~400-fold increase (95% CI: 0.03–4,000,000) in the likelihood of the observed monthly anomaly of June 2021 between prescribed and interactive soil moisture ensembles, transforming it from an extremely unlikely ~500,000-yearly (~1,000–∞) event to a ~1,400-yearly (~150–∞) event.

Goodness me! Amazing! What was once an event not expected to occur more than once in half a million years has now become an event which is expected to recur every 1400 years. That’s pretty good going, but it’s still rare even in their shape-shifted land-atmosphere interacting climate. Too rare; they need it to be much more common in order to generate the necessary amount of public alarm about an event which probably has almost nothing to do with the ‘climate crisis’. So here’s where they really go to town on the ‘data’.

Increasing event likelihood driven by climate change

Recent climate change has rapidly increased the likelihood of the 2021 heatwave: over the past 70 years, such an event has multiplied in probability from virtually impossible to a multihundred-yearly event (Fig. 4). As above, we apply GEV analysis, a targeted approach for estimating extreme value statistics and an established method for attributing climate extremes to anthropogenic warming. We note that assessing the probability of this event in temperature alone—despite its multivariate extreme characteristics—probably conservatively estimates its increasing likelihood as a compound event, given simultaneous trends in other variables such as soil moisture.

Our Mission Impossible agents literally perform miracles in order to get the job done.

We apply GEV analysis to yearly-maximum June–August daily temperatures extending back to 1950, to maximize sample size and robustness, with both location and scale parameters non-stationary in 5-year-smoothed GMST (Methods). Results reveal drastic historical changes in heatwave probabilities: a hypothetical daily 8 °C regional temperature anomaly is estimated to have been virtually impossible in the 1950–1985 climate but has become an ~50-yearly event in the climate since 1986 (Fig. 4b). Similarly, the 2021 heatwave (an ~10.4 °C peak anomaly, far exceeding the historical range) was virtually impossible even at the average global temperature over 1986–2021 (return period 95% CI: 1,500–∞) but by 2021 has become a ~200-yearly event (25–∞)—thereby experiencing an infinite increase in probability (at least ~13-fold). Its probability increase since 1950–1985 is likewise infinite (at least ~500,000-fold). Furthermore, the probability of an event exceeding the magnitude of 2021 will increase rapidly under further increasing GMST—projected to recur ~10-yearly before 2050.

Bloody hell! Is that not scary enough for ya? There’s been an infinite increase in the probability of searing heatwaves just since 1985! The ‘climate crisis’ has changed the climate of the Pacific Northwest beyond all recognition basically (you could say it’s been FUBAR’d) – what once was impossible has now become possible and in a few more years, it will become routine. But they can only perform this miraculous ‘scientific’ feat by including the observed ‘impossible’ 2021 heatwave in their statistical calculations.

In including 2021, we follow refs. 45,46,49, assuming that the observation of 2021 is drawn from the same distribution as historical observations, since the study region was not selected solely to maximize local extremity but rather for a large-scale regional perspective, reducing (but not eliminating) selection bias. Alternatively, however, the excluding-2021 fit estimates a finite maximum possible temperature well below the 2021 observation even under current warming (Fig. 4b), questioning its validity. We note that the including-2021 fit is not rejected by a Kolmogorov–Smirnov test (Supplementary Figs. 9 and 10) despite its poor fit in similar analyses, which maintained a fixed scale parameter and analysed a smaller region more concentrated on the extreme. Ultimately, both fits underscore dramatic increases in heat-extreme probabilities resulting from gradual warming: in both, an ~1,000-yearly event in the 1950s would currently resemble an ~5-yearly event and has been surpassed many times (Fig. 4a). Furthermore, comparing future projections of a 2021-magnitude event, the fits roughly converge, both projecting <10-yearly recurrences by 2.5 °C GMST above pre-industrial temperatures. Notably, this threshold only increases to 2.75 °C GMST in a GEV fit with stationary instead of non-stationary scale parameters.

This is what their GEV fit including 2021 looks like:

The red curve in fig b, which fits past observations, does not intersect the 2021 event (dashed line). Their new distribution, which includes 2021 (but fails to align with any previous observations) intersects the 2021 event at about 200 years, allowing the authors to make their wild claims above.

The authors conclude the following:

Notably, land–atmosphere coupling and temperature variability increases are strongest where soil moisture is climatologically moderate instead of the driest areas—thus, in the PNW, drying may increase temperature variability more than in already arid regions like the southwestern United States. In accordance with recent research demonstrating the emergence of heat-amplifying land–atmosphere feedbacks in regions not historically experiencing them and, moreover, projections of widespread mid century soil moisture regime shifts including the PNW37, we suggest that the 2021 heatwave may represent an alarming manifestation of a shifting regime across much of the PNW from wet to transitional climate, making such events more likely through strengthened soil moisture–temperature coupling—however, further research is required to substantiate this.

In a final part of this series, I’ll be looking at this claim.

WaPo: “A new climate reality: Less warming, but worse impacts on the planet” PMSL

The climate change alarmists are being forced to admit that their catastrophic projections of global warming are not happening. But rather than admit that they were wrong, they’re just moving the goal posts plus absurdly claiming that the lack of warming is because of their stupid windmills! It’s unbelievable. These people are pathologically incapable of admitting error. Here’s what the Washington Post is now claiming:

In the not-so-distant past, scientists predicted that global temperatures would surge dramatically throughout this century, assuming that humans would rely heavily on fossil fuels for decades. But they are revising their forecasts as they track both signs of progress and unexpected hazards.

[Translation: We got it wrong.]

Accelerating solar and wind energy adoption means global warming probably will not reach the extremes once feared, climate scientists say. At the same time, recent heat, storms and ecological disasters prove, they say, that climate change impacts could be more severe than predicted even with less warming.

Researchers are increasingly worried about the degree to whicheven less-than-extreme increases in global temperatures will intensify heat and storms, irreversibly destabilize natural systems and overwhelm even highly developed societies. Extremes considered virtually impossible not long ago are already occurring.

[Translation: Our silly windmills and solar panels have prevented really catastrophic global warming but extreme weather is worse than we thought, even though global warming is not as bad we pretended it would be, so we still need more windmills and solar panels and a ban on gas boilers, cookers and cars in order to prevent nasty weather.]

This is called wanting to have your cake and eat it. In defence of the ‘extreme weather is a lot more extreme than we thought it would be’ meme, they cite the recent ‘heatwave’ (more a very brief flash in the pan actually) which occurred in the Pacific Northwest:

Take, for example, a heat wave that descended on the Pacific Northwest in June 2021. Portland and Seattle hit record highs of 116 degrees and 108 degrees, respectively. British Columbia broke Canadian high-temperature records three days in a row, peaking at 121 degrees — more than 40 degrees hotter than normal for that time of year.

Scientists quickly determined the heat was so extreme, it could not have occurred without the influence of global warming. Further research found that, in a world with 2 degrees of warming above preindustrial temperatures, it may be a once-in-a-decade sort of event.

It’s hard to know where to start with dissecting the bullshit in these statements, because when you look at the ‘science’ which they are quoting, it all falls apart spectacularly. When they say that the peak maximum daytime temperatures reached in the Pacific NW ‘heatwave’ could not have occurred without global warming, what they mean is that, even with global warming, they were impossible! That’s what the study found. Here’s the proof:

The red curve is the current (globally warmed) climate with 95% confidence intervals. The blue curve is the hypothetical climate without alleged man-made global warming. What do you notice? The actual event is way above the red curve even: they never intersect. This means that the event in question is statistically impossible even with global warming! That was the statistical analysis. The models were just as bad. I wrote about this ‘rapid extreme weather attribution study here:

Climate & Covid: Challenging Unenlightenment ‘Science’

Unraveling ‘Attribution’ Pseudoscience – No, the NW Pacific Heatwave Would NOT Have Been ‘Virtually Impossible’ Without Global Warming

This is what the media is claiming, this is what ‘scientists’ are claiming. This is what Matt McGrath at the BBC is claiming: The searing heat that scorched western Canada and the US at the end of June was “virtually impossible” without climate change, say scientists…

2 years ago · Jaime Jessop

And here:

Climate & Covid: Challenging Unenlightenment ‘Science’

NW Pacific Heatwave Attribution – Multiple Climate Model Failure

The authors describe the models used thus: Model simulations from the 6th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6; Eyring et al., 2016) are assessed. We combine the historical simulations (1850 to 2015) with the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) projections (O’Neill et al., 2016) for the years 2016 to 2100. Here, we only use data from SSP5-8.5, alt…

2 years ago · Jaime Jessop

By sleight of hand and via some extremely dubious statistical manipulation, the authors managed to conclude that the event in today’s climate was as rare as a 1 in a 1000 year event, even though their own statistical analysis and climate models showed that it was an impossible event. The dishonest media then propagate the myth by telling us that without climate change, such a heatwave would have been impossible, conveniently neglecting to mention that the ‘scientific’ study which they so enthusiastically cite, demonstrated that it was impossible with climate change, meaning that something other than a generalised global warming must have caused it. Exactly the same thing happened with the 40C ‘heatwave’ in the UK last year.

Climate & Covid: Challenging Unenlightenment ‘Science’

It’s Wired’s Turn To Hero-Worship Friederike Otto Whilst Grossly Misleading The Public About Her UK 40C Attribution Study

11 days ago · 11 likes · 2 comments · Jaime Jessop

As if that wasn’t enough, the ‘experts’ and the fawning media then go on to tell us that such ‘impossible’ events could become routine in 20 years time. How? Well, after torturing the data and shoe-horning the ‘impossible’ event into an extremely dubious statistical trend, the authors then use extremely unrealistic model projections of global warming over the next 20 years to conclude that the NW Pacific heatwave might happen every 5-10 years by the early 2040s. OMG! Scary!

In order to reach 2C above pre-industrial global mean surface temperature (defined as before 1850) in 20 years time, the world would have to warm another 0.8C, which is 0.4C per decade. But we have already seen that, since 1979, the world has warmed by just 0.13C per decade and it’s currently not warming at all:

Climate & Covid: Challenging Unenlightenment ‘Science’

Two Terrifying Graphs Which Reveal The Climate Crisis

12 days ago · 24 likes · 10 comments · Jaime Jessop

So, the authors of this attribution study quoted by WaPo, which include the infamous ‘Fredi’ Otto, are using extremely unrealistic projections of global warming and unscientific statistical analyses to conclude that extreme weather which would have been ‘impossible without global warming’ is going to become a regular occurrence in just a few short years. The supreme irony here of course is that WaPo are simultaneously claiming that global warming is not as bad as we thought, nor likely to be as extreme as was thought. Ergo, the extreme weather which they claim is ‘worse than we thought’, even though global warming is less than feared, that so-called ‘catastrophic’ weather which they claim is becoming a lot more frequent and will become even more frequent, can only become a lot more frequent if the world is warming and does warm a lot more rapidly than it has in reality or likely will! Their position is entirely contradictory, but they’re either too stupid or too pig-headed to realise it.

It’s Wired’s Turn To Hero-Worship Friederike Otto Whilst Grossly Misleading The Public About Her UK 40C Attribution Study

‘Fredi’ is the darling of the lame stream media at the moment, who it would seem are singularly intent upon bigging her up by falsely attributing scientific rigour and undeniable evidential value to her extreme weather attribution studies. It’s pissing me off to be honest; no, not because I harbour some personal grudge against Otto (she just happens to be the public face of WWA – and a climate activist), but because of their dishonesty and misdirection, which they carry out so easily, reaching a wide audience, but which takes a lot of thought, time and effort to try and correct whilst reaching a very limited audience.

After the Guardian extolled the virtues of Climate Change Wonder Woman and her magical, miraculous, marvellous extreme weather attribution studies, Wired have now picked up where they left off and have decided to concentrate on the extreme marvellousness of her 2022 UK 40C ‘extreme heatwave’ (all sixty seconds of it at RAF Coningsby) attribution study. At least Wired managed a more flattering photo than the Guardian (although I’m not so sure about the purple jumpsuit hand-knitted by someone’s granny):

Wired think that her attribution studies are so forensically, scientifically watertight, that they can be used in a court of law, which would be hilarious if it were not for the fact that sooner or later, the climate lawfare rabble will attempt to use one of these attribution studies to try and ascribe blame to countries or corporations for an individual extreme weather event and thereby exact financial compensation for ‘damages’ caused by that event. Seeing as how the judiciary, like all other institutions, is captured by the globalists, this is a worrying development.

If attribution studies can tell us that a disaster was made more severe because of climate change, they also point toward something else: Who might be held responsible. Richard Heede, a geographer from California, has spent decades delving through archives to estimate companies’ carbon emissions all the way back to before the Industrial Revolution. The result is known as the Carbon Majors: a database of the world’s biggest polluters up to the present moment. The 2017 Carbon Majors report found that half of all industrial emissions since 1988 could be traced to just 25 corporate or state-owned entities. The state-owned fossil fuel firm Saudi Aramco alone is responsible for 4.5 percent of the world’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions between 1988 and 2015.

This data is extremely useful for people trying to bring legal cases against fossil fuel firms. In May 2022, a group of scientists and lawyers traveled to the Peruvian Andes to inspect a giant glacier that looms over the crystalline waters of Lake Palcacocha. If the glacier collapses into the lake, scientists fear it could submerge the nearby city of Huarez. Peruvian farmer Saúl Luciano Lliuya thinks that polluters should foot the cost of defending the city from floodwater as global warming has shrunk glaciers around Lake Palcacocha, increasing the risk of dangerous flooding. The target of the lawsuit is the German energy firm RWE, which was responsible for 0.47 percent of all industrial greenhouse gas emissions between 1751 and 2010, according to Heede’s data. Lliuya is suing for just £14,250 ($17,170)—that’s 0.47 percent of the cost of protecting Huaraz.

If Lliuya wins the case, it could set a precedent that polluters can be held legally responsible for the effects of their emissions anywhere on the planet. “That would really change this narrative that we’re operating in,” Otto says. It would also make the work of weather attribution even more critical. If scientists know that climate change had made flooding in an area twice as severe as it would have been, for example, they can use that evidence to estimate how much individual companies and states contributed to that disaster. One of Otto’s students is already working on a legal case in Brazil that involves weather attribution. “We have seen a huge interest in that. It’s not just journalists calling and wanting to know, but also lawyers,” Otto says.

You can see where this is going can’t you and you can see why Otto and her admirers in the left wing media are getting so excited about this ‘science’ of extreme weather attribution which can supposedly dust the fingerprints off extreme weather events to find the guilty party – man-made climate change. I’m not going there right at this moment and law is not my thing. All I know is that these ‘attribution studies’ are crap and should never pass the high bar required for use as scientific evidence in a court of law.

Where I am going is back to this wretched UK ‘40C heatwave’ attribution. Wired says:

In the case of the UK heat wave, World Weather Attribution was ready with its report just nine days after temperatures reached their peak.

The findings revealed the unprecedented scale of the record-breaking temperatures. Otto’s team estimated that climate change had made the UK heat wave at least 10 times more likely, and that in a world without global warming peak temperatures would have been about 2 degrees Celsius lower. The weather was so unusual that, in a world without climate change, it would have been statistically impossible to reach such high temperatures in two out of the three weather stations the scientists studied. In the world of climate attribution science, this is about as close as you get to a smoking gun. “People always want the number, and sometimes you can’t give a very satisfactory number,” Otto says. This time, however, Otto had no shortage of numbers to share with the reporters who were ringing her up.

‘Smoking gun’? You’ve got to be kidding. Somebody’s obviously smoking something, but it’s not a gun!

Firstly, yes, they did find that, in a world which was 1.2C cooler than today (1850 – ‘pre-industrial’), this heatwave would have been 2C cooler. But guess what? The actual heatwave, according to observations, facts, empirical data, was 4C hotter than pre-industrial, which means that the models only project half the warming in maximum daytime temperatures which has taken place! Wired don’t mention that, strangely. They also don’t mention that, even in a 1.2C warmer world, the temperatures recorded at two of the weather stations would have been virtually impossible. All they say is that they would have been statistically impossible in a 1.2C cooler world, implying that this is the ‘smoking gun’ which proves climate change dunnit (in the conservatory, with the revolver, I presume!). This is a hideously malign misdirection. I can show you why. Here are the graphs of statistical return times of the maximum temperatures at the individual stations, in a climate changed world (red) and 1.2C cooler world (blue) from Otto’s study. Magenta line is the actual recorded maximum temperature:

GEV stands for Generalised Extreme Value distribution. You can see it shifts up uniformly with global warming. The outer lines are the upper and lower 95% confidence bounds.

As you can see, in the case of Cranwell, the red (1.2C warmer world) line intersects the majenta line somewhere beyond a return time of 1000 years. Being a log scale along the horizontal axis, I imagine this means that, even in a warmer world, the temperature at Cranwell can be expected to happen only about once every 1500 years, i.e. it’s still a very rare event. Looking at St James’ park, the red central line never intersects the majenta line, even out to 10,000 year return times and it doesn’t look like it is going to beyond that. Even the upper 95% confidence bound does not intersect the majenta line. This effectively means that the temperature recorded at St James’ Park is impossible in a 1.2C warmer world – therefore something else other than climate change must have contributed to this extreme reading.

At Durham too, the central estimate never gets anywhere near the majenta line, but the 95% CI upper bound does intersect beyond a return period of 1000 years. This implies also that the temperature recorded at Durham is virtually impossible. So that’s two out of three stations where the recorded temperatures would have been impossible or nearly impossible even in a world warmed supposedly by emissions of greenhouse gases. You’re telling me that this is good enough to put before a judge in order to force fossil fuel companies to pay out millions in compensation to the alleged victims of extreme weather caused by alleged man-made climate change? In what Kangaroo court?

Was There A Bad Batch Of Turkeys In Durham?

Or maybe Christmas puds? What else can explain why Durham Police attended 8 sudden deaths on Christmas Day 2022? In their own words:

Christmas Day 2022: 339 incidents, 339 people who needed our help.

Our first call came in just 11 minutes into the day; a catalytic converter stolen from a car parked on a Chester-le-Street industrial estate.

By the time the little ones were waking to open their Xmas presents at 6am, we had dealt with 62 incidents including a fight outside a Chester-le-Street pub.

And as people sat down to watch the King’s Speech after dinner, we were dealing with reports of an altercation in the street in Seaham, our 173rd call of the day. Thankfully, it turned out to be a false alarm.

Sadly we attended eight sudden deaths, we sorted out a parking dispute in Darlington, dealt with at least three road collisions and looked for two escaped horses in the south of the county.

Apparently, according to a FOIA request shown on the video with this tweet, there was an average of about one sudden adult death per day in England and Wales in the five years from 2016-2020. Those figures would have to be checked.

Mariana Vayanas 🌹 @TruTHGiRL__

📍8 sudden deaths on #Christmas Day. For all those that think it is normal and that it happens all the time at this rate here are some official stats for you! We usually average less than 1 per week!

5:44 PM ∙ Dec 31, 2022

11Likes11Retweets

If the above FOIA data is correct, then eight sudden deaths happening on Christmas Day in County Durham alone is cause for an urgent investigation I would have thought. Was it a bad batch of Christmas Turkeys . . . . . or something else? No mention on their website that Durham Police are investigating these deaths. Autopsies? Crickets. The BBC reports that they are ‘not suspicious’. Really? How do they come to that conclusion?

I wonder how many ‘non-suspicious’ sudden adult deaths UK police forces have attended in total over Christmas and the New Year?

2 2

SAVE CROSS-POST

Extreme Weather Attribution Pseudoscience – Meet The Imperial College Scientist Who “Peers Into The Dark Center” Of ‘Climate Disasters’

A Brief Journey into the Dark Art of Rapid Extreme Weather Attribution

I make no apologies for my language here. Extreme weather attribution is pseudoscience, hocus pocus, dark magic, which is increasingly being used to propagandise the weather for the purposes of selling a non-existent ‘climate emergency’ to the public. The abuse of science to serve politics and ideology annoys me greatly, especially when it is done by supposed ‘scientists’ exploiting their positions of academic privilege in formerly highly respected institutions like Oxford University and Imperial College, London. I say formerly because a lot of their prestige has worn off in recent years (e.g. Professor Pantsdown’s ludicrous Covid models came out of Imperial), but supposedly, they are still among the top globally rated institutions of higher education and academic research.

I wouldn’t be concentrating my fire on one person normally, except that the Guardian has seen fit to paint this woman as some kind of climate-saving superhero uniquely invested with the superhuman skills necessary to illuminate the dark centre of climate-related disasters, and apparently she’s quite happy for the Graun to profile her in that way.

‘I am an optimistic person’: the scientist who studies climate catastrophes

Right, yeah, off to a flying start then, complete with red and blue cape. The Wonder Woman of Climate Catastrophes.

Cycling over London Bridge as the dry heat pushed the temperature above 40C and a hot wind gusted down the River Thames, Friederike Otto paused to look at the monument to the city’s great fire more than 350 years earlier.

“The heat was intense, the humidity was so low and there were these winds. You could almost feel if there was one spark now, London will burn again,” she said.

For Otto, who spends her working life looking into the apocalypse of extreme weather, the homes it destroys, the lives it takes, the children it leaves orphaned, she had found herself inside one of her own studies.

Hmmm.

Otto, known as Fredi, and a small team of researchers are the world’s only rapid reaction force of climate scientists [X Men!]. They target extreme weather across the world almost as it happens, reach out to local people on the ground, and carry out deep, rigorous statistical analysis, which is transforming our understanding of how human-caused global heating is affecting the planet and our lives.

Until now, scientists have had to be equivocal about whether a single weather event is linked to global heating. Otto’s work makes the connection between the string of disasters the world is suffering and global heating, much clearer.

‘Rigorous statistical analysis’, eh? ‘Much clearer’ connection between ‘climate change’ and extreme weather, huh? Here is my analysis of just one example of their ‘rigorous statistical analysis’ back in 2016, in my article above:

Take, for instance, the flooding in France and Germany at the end of May this year. They have an attribution! Climate change was definitely implicated in the flooding in France, but the results of the Climate Central World Weather Attribution study are inconclusive for Germany. Which is odd, to say the least, because the flooding in Germany was caused by the same low pressure system as the flooding which occurred in northern France a couple of days later! It would seem that, by crossing the national border from Germany into France, this extreme weather made the leap from ‘cannot be attributed to climate change’ to ‘can be attributed to climate change’!

It turns out that because they deliberately chose to analyse the flooding by looking at slightly different meteorological variables in each country, they were only able to attribute the floods to climate change in France, not Germany. Does that sound ‘clear’ or ‘statistically robust’ to you?

So they looked at rainfall in each country separately and compared the current rainfall with the past rainfall in each region. The 1-day rainfall in Germany was truly exceptional (in terms of the past records), even more so than the 3-day rainfall in France, but, because observations showed a significant decline in 1-day rainfall in the region [Germany] and because only 1 climate model predicted a small increase in response to climate change (contrary to observations), they could not draw any firm conclusions on attribution. It was just a really extreme event. With France, all the climate models predicted a large increase in the probability of extreme 3-day rainfall in the Loire and Seine basins. So despite the fact that observations showed a positive but not significant increase in 3-day rainfall in both French regions, simply because the models were in good agreement and all predicted a large increase in the probability of such intense rainfall occurring, these researchers concluded that the exceptional rainfall in France could be attributed to climate change! On that basis alone!

In reality, 3-day extreme rainfall has not increased significantly in France and has even declined very significantly (over 1 day) in Germany (since 1960 anyway). A very unusual storm comes along and upsets the apple cart in both regions, days apart, but climate scientists can only ‘fast attribute’ the French floods to climate change because their all singing-all dancing computer models predicted an increase in the probability of such events occurring (after 1960) in France only. Wow. That’s ‘climate science’s quick-as-you-can extreme weather attribution’ in action! Are we not amazed, astounded, gob-smacked and humbled? Or maybe just gob-smacked?

Pseudoscience. Hocus pocus. Black magic. Like I said. But this was just the beginning. They started out as they meant to continue. I’ve exposed quite a few ‘attributions’ from World Weather Attribution over the years, but let’s look at one of their most recent, the extreme high temperatures recorded in the UK in July 2022, which the Guardian boasts about on her behalf thus:

In 2022, Otto was busier than ever, peering into the dark centre of many disasters: the tropical cyclones in Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique, the heatwaves in India and Pakistan, droughts in west and east Africa, floods in Brazil, floods in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, the last heatwave in the UK, drought in western Europe, flooding in Germany, the floods in Pakistan, and most recently severe flooding in Nigeria, Niger and Chad.

I looked at that UK extreme heat attribution here:

https://jaimejessop.substack.com/p/extreme-weather-attribution-pseudoscience

Here is a stunning example of their ‘rigorous statistical analysis’ in that particular (non-peer reviewed) study:

Including Climate Change and Excluding Everything Else

That’s what the authors do here. They assume that the long term rise in global temperature (attributed almost entirely to man-made greenhouse gases) is the main driver of very brief periods of extreme temperatures locally. They mention other factors which might also have an influence, but then totally ignore them in order to arrive at their event attribution!

Statistical Analysis – Temperatures at 2 Stations were so Extreme they were Impossible!

You read that right. Impossible. They had to include the impossible event in the trend in order to make it fit the statistical trend! Got that?

It is assumed that the distribution of temperature extremes shifts due to global warming without changing the shape.

So there you go. Using their GEV fit, the authors of this current attribution study make the above assumptions (i.e. they exclude the probable) and they find that, in 2 stations out of 3, the temperatures recorded would be impossible even in a world which is 1.2C warmer due to global warming! Thus, they have to shoe-horn those ‘impossible’ extreme temperatures into a new statistical distribution in order to arrive at realistic probabilities of the return times.

So, their ‘rigorous statistical analysis’ was basically pants, but that wasn’t the end of it. Even their climate model simulations failed miserably to make the link between this very brief extreme UK heat and ‘climate change’!

Climate Model Simulations Also Fail To Simulate Extreme Temperature Observations

The climate models also confirm the results of the statistical analysis, namely that the extreme high temperatures recorded, especially on the 19th, are just too extreme. In fact, the climate model simulations predict only a 2C rise in extreme temperature for this event, not a 4C increase as observed.

The climate models were 100% out compared with observations! This is compounded by the fact that the climate models they used were biased towards high climate sensitivity (degrees centigrade rise in global mean temperature per doubling of atmospheric CO2).

It is absolutely shocking and a damning indictment of modern ‘science’ that the Graun should cite this shoddy piece of work as a glowing example of ‘rigorous statistical analysis’ and elevate the author to the status of some scientific wizard guru who can ‘peer into the dark centre of climate catastrophes’ and reveal all for the benefit of us uneducated simpletons. Bullshit!

The Future Is White At The BBC But Climate Change Is ‘Inherently Racist’

No, seriously. This is not sarcasm. Tune into BBC Future; do not adjust your TV. Do double-check your TV Licence direct debit though – just to convince yourself that you are actually paying for this. So what is BBC Future all about then?

We believe in truth, facts, and science. We take the time to think. And we don’t accept — we ask why.

Aww, isn’t that nice? They believe in truth, facts and science. Brilliant. Except truth, facts and science do not require belief – unlike God. They require only honest observation and critical appraisal to verify to the best of one’s ability that they are indeed the facts which might reasonably approximate to the truth and that science does indeed plausibly explain those facts. Of course, if you can’t, or won’t do this, then you do need belief – the belief in ‘experts’. But then, if that was the case, then you would just accept, without asking why, which is what BBC Future insist they don’t do! So they directly contradict themselves in their boastful blurb.

We look for answers to the issues facing the world in science. You’ll find stories here on almost every topic that matters. Psychology. Food. Climate change. Health. Social trends. Technology.

What links them all is our approach. Through evidence-based analysis, original thinking, and powerful storytelling, we shine a light on the hidden ways that the world is changing – and provide solutions for how to navigate it. Energised by the everyday, we think no topic is too small to be fascinating. Inspired by obstacles, we believe no subject is too overwhelming to tackle.

Bear these boasts in mind when considering the following BBC Future article on climate change:

Why climate change is inherently racist

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it was the city’s black neighbourhoods that bore the brunt of the storm. Twelve years later, it was the black districts of Houston that took the full force of Hurricane Harvey. In both cases, natural disasters compounded issues in neighbourhoods that were already stretched.

Climate change and racism are two of the biggest challenges of the 21st Century. They are also strongly intertwined. There is a stark divide between who has caused climate change and who is suffering its effects. People of colour across the Global South are those who will be most affected by the climate crisis, even though their carbon footprints are generally very low. Similar racial divides exist within nations too, due to profound structural inequalities laid down by a long legacy of unequal power relationships.

Zambia clearly demonstrates this injustice of climate change. Average carbon footprints in Zambia are very low, coming in at just 0.36 tonnes per person per year – less than one-tenth of the UK average. Nevertheless, the country is facing environmental disaster, including a prolonged drought which left over a million people in need of food assistance in 2021.

“Zambia has been experiencing the negative impact of climate variability and change for the last three decades,” says Zambian climate scientist Mulako Kabisa. “The biggest impact has been increased temperature and reduced rainfall, resulting in climate shocks that include droughts and floods.”

These changes in rainfall and temperature have resulted in crop failure, livestock deaths and reduced the country’s GDP, she adds. “Droughts in particular have led to livelihood loss for the smallholder-dominated agricultural sector, because production is dependent on availability of adequate rain.”

‘Evidence based analysis’? No, this is a masterclass in deceptive mixed message reporting and the deliberate obfuscation or ignorance of relevant facts. In this respect, the BBC does at least live up to part of their boast: ‘evidence-based analysis, original thinking, and powerful storytelling’. This is great story-telling, but certainly not original thinking (similar messaging re. ‘climate justice’ is repeated ad nauseum throughout the left wing media) and it bears little resemblance to an ‘evidence-based analysis’, as we shall see.

The evidence part of this analysis consists entirely of the unremarkable observation that poorer communities tend to be disproportionately affected by extreme weather events, in particular severe flooding, and that poorer communities, in both the global north and the global south, tend to be populated by people who are non-white. They got that right, but it’s got sod all to do with climate change per se being inherently racist.

This is just a repetition of the all too familiar message that wealth tends to be concentrated in countries whose populations are predominantly white and, within those countries, in communities which are also predominantly white. At least, that’s how it used to be: wealth is now increasingly concentrated into the hands of an elitist globalist few (who also happen to be predominantly white). In other words, billionaire whites have been hoovering up wealth at an alarming rate in the last few years and the victims of that recent cash grab have been whites and blacks. What this means is that relatively wealthy white populations are becoming poorer and the predominantly non-white ‘global south’ is sliding into extreme poverty, with all the inherent dangers which that poses. What it also means is that poorer white communities are also disproportionately affected by this money and power grab. Is this racist? No, it just means the globalist elite are robbing all people equally, but because the Third World and poorer communities in general didn’t start off equal in the first place, they are going to suffer more. So also with ‘climate change’. We can debate the causes of these inequalities until the cows come home but what we cannot do is label bad weather as ‘inherently racist’!

The personnel profile of BBC Future looks inherently racist to me. Hmm, maybe it’s my poor eyesight, but I can’t see much diversity there, can you?

This privileged group of presumably middle class white people are pontificating to the rest of us not so privileged black, brown and white people that climate change is inherently racist against non-whites, even though its mitigation in the form of a retrogressive top down imposed net zero agenda is not, because ultimately, it’s going to affect all humans on this planet, very badly. I don’t know about you, but I’m personally sick of being patronised and spoke down to by these hypocritical, scientifically and historically illiterate meddlesome left wing eco-freaks and Marxists at the BBC and elsewhere. Just who the hell do they think they are? The self-appointed governors of our future is who.

So let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of actual climate change shall we. The one indisputable fact is that, since the 1970s, for whatever reason, the world has warmed fairly rapidly, after having cooled fairly rapidly from the mid 1940s to the 60s and 70s. It’s also true to say that, for whatever reason, the world has warmed generally since the end of the Little Ice Age around the middle of the 19th century. Climate activists tell you it’s your fault and ‘climate justice’ activists point to white people and say it’s their fault (and that of their ancestors) for having the temerity to initiate firstly, national industrial revolutions, which lifted their populations out of poverty, and subsequent to that, an unequally spread global industrial revolution which resulted in billions of people (of all races) being propelled out of extreme poverty. Climate zealots wish to reverse this process.

We can all agree that the Industrial Revolution kicked off in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries and from there, spread globally. More particularly, Great Britain, which had an empire in those days, initiated this global industrial revolution – which is presumably why us brits are being punished by a net zero agenda which is being imposed harder and faster than almost anywhere else in the world. So if ‘climate change’ is inherently racist, we would expect Europe and the global north to be getting off lightly whilst the global south suffers terribly no? Oh dear, this is where the ‘evidenced-based analysis’ starts to break down, because, according to climate change zealots themselves, Europe has been heating at twice the global average since 1991. Oops.

It’s not just a case of simple temperature rises either, it’s also a case of worsening impacts according to Climate Alarmist HQ The Guardian. Europeans (the same pesky white Europeans who allegedly caused all this chaos in the first place) are suffering disproportionately from extreme weather events, especially heatwaves and flooding. Stick that in your ‘climate justice’ pipe and smoke it BBC Future!

Temperatures in Europe have increased at more than twice the global average in the last 30 years, according to a report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

The effects of this warming are already being seen, with droughts, wildfires and ice melts taking place across the continent. The European State of the Climate report, produced with the EU’s Copernicus service, warns that as the warming trend continues, exceptional heat, wildfires, floods and other climate breakdown outcomes will affect society, economies and ecosystems.

From 1991 to 2021, temperatures in Europe have warmed at an average rate of about 0.5C a decade. This has had physical results: Alpine glaciers lost 30 metres in ice thickness between 1997 and 2021, while the Greenland ice sheet has also been melting, contributing to sea level rise. In summer 2021, Greenland had its first ever recorded rainfall at its highest point, Summit station.

Human life has been lost as a result of the extreme weather events. The report says that in 2021, high impact weather and climate events – 84% of which were floods and storms – led to hundreds of fatalities, directly affected more than 500,000 people, and caused economic damages exceeding $50bn.

“Europe presents a live picture of a warming world and reminds us that even well-prepared societies are not safe from impacts of extreme weather events,” said the WMO secretary general, Prof Petteri Taalas. “This year, like 2021, large parts of Europe have been affected by extensive heatwaves and drought, fuelling wildfires. In 2021, exceptional floods caused death and devastation.”

What could be the cause of this extreme weather trend in Europe I wonder? ‘It’s climate change innit’ intone the scientifically and factually challenged eco-zealots and neo-Malthusian climate justice warriors in perfect unison. But is it? No, as it turns out. The proximate cause is a shifting jet stream according to recent research:

Accelerated western European heatwave trends linked to more-persistent double jets over Eurasia

Persistent heat extremes can have severe impacts on ecosystems and societies, including excess mortality, wildfires, and harvest failures. Here we identify Europe as a heatwave hotspot, exhibiting upward trends that are three-to-four times faster compared to the rest of the northern midlatitudes over the past 42 years. This accelerated trend is linked to atmospheric dynamical changes via an increase in the frequency and persistence of double jet stream states over Eurasia. We find that double jet occurrences are particularly important for western European heatwaves, explaining up to 35% of temperature variability. The upward trend in the persistence of double jet events explains almost all of the accelerated heatwave trend in western Europe, and about 30% of it over the extended European region. Those findings provide evidence that in addition to thermodynamical drivers, atmospheric dynamical changes have contributed to the increased rate of European heatwaves, with implications for risk management and potential adaptation strategies.

So, in Western Europe, the place responsible for starting the Industrial and Economic Revolution, powered by the exploitation of fossil fuels to provide cheap, reliable, abundant energy, it’s the jet stream which is entirely responsible for the trends in extreme weather and not climate change!

COVID Reset: The Day of Reckoning Is Coming — Undercurrents

The crimes committed by the “COVID military-industrial complex” — Governments, Big Tech, Media, Big Pharma and the Bioweapons research industry worldwide — are now so numerous and so egregious, it’s hard to fathom they’ll get away with it forever A day of reckoning is coming. It seems our public health authorities fear this as well, […]
COVID Reset: The Day of Reckoning Is Coming — Undercurrents

Heatwave Deaths Propaganda

If heat kills, why did a lot more people die in summer 2021 compared to 2022?

Inevitably, as we proceed headlong into a chilly October, with the promise of high energy prices, blackouts and energy rationing during a long possibly harsh winter, and massive excess deaths due to the cold, the media is hyping the supposed excess deaths caused by the record breaking temperatures experienced (very briefly) in the UK this year. The ONS and UKHSA have joined forces to publish a study. Here’s how they explain what they’re doing:

ONS reports on mortality in regular weekly and monthly releases. UKHSA reports on mortality caused by specific public health incidents, such as periods of prolonged heat, in annual reports.

As both organisations publish on mortality during heat-periods, we have combined the releases to include both organisation’s statistics to give a more comprehensive picture and help users understand the difference.

The usual suspects in the media are salivating over this combined report, e.g. the usual misleading crap and ‘climate crisis’ propaganda in the eco-fascist Guardian:

More than 2,800 more people aged 65 and over died in England during this summer’s heatwaves than would have otherwise, figures show, marking the highest excess death toll caused by heat in at least two decades.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) recorded 43,755 non-Covid-related deaths of people in the 65-plus age group during this summer’s heatwaves in England.

This was 2,809 more deaths than would be expected based on the surrounding fortnight, the highest number since the introduction of the heatwave plan for England in 2004.

Bob Ward, from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said: “These figures confirm the fear that the record-breaking temperatures this summer caused a record number of deaths. Most of these deaths were preventable and the government refused to take additional precautions even though it knew its heatwave plan was not fit for purpose.

“The threat to lives and livelihoods from summer heatwaves is undoubtedly increasing due to climate change. The prime minister must now act decisively by initiating a national heat risk management strategy that can be properly put in place ahead of next summer and prevent further unnecessary suffering and death across the country.”

You can always rely on Knob Ward to turn the climate change bullshit dial right up to number 10. But note, they are talking exclusively about the UKHSA analysis here, which is an estimate of heat deaths based on a statistical model, not simply actual registered deaths, as with the ONS figures. I quote:

Across all five heat-periods of 2022, adjusting for registration delays, the estimated total excess mortality (excluding coronavirus (COVID-19)) in England was 2,803 for the most vulnerable age group (those aged 65 years and over), the highest number since the introduction of the Heatwave plan for England in 2004.
This analysis was compiled by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) using a statistical model to adjust for registration delays to estimate excess mortality (excluding COVID-19) during heat-periods.

It is important to note the differences between the UKHSA’s methodology for calculating heatwave excess deaths and that of the ONS. The fake news media doesn’t do this of course because their prime intention is to deceive and sell the public a narrative. The published report clearly sets out the differences:

4.Impact of methodological differences

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) measure refers to the number of deaths occurring during periods of heat (including all causes), whereas the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) estimated excess deaths (excluding coronavirus (COVID-19)) during heat-period figures are based on a statistical model. This makes an adjustment to account for registration delays. Interpretation of the analysis presented in this report should consider these differences in methodology.

Here is how the ONS count excess deaths:

Excess mortality during heat-periods

the deaths registered in England and Wales
all ages and broad age-group
all causes (combined and break down)
deaths that occurred and were registered by 7 September 2022
uses the five-year average as a baseline, or the preceding and subsequent days relative to the number of heat-period days.

Upwards of 90% of deaths are registered by 7 Sept, so this gives a pretty accurate picture of actual deaths occurring from all causes and for all ages, compared to the 5 year baseline.

Here’s how the UKHSA estimate their heatwave deaths:

Estimated excess mortality (excluding COVID-19) during heat-periods

the deaths registered in England
aged 65 years and over
removes deaths that tested positive for coronavirus (COVID-19)
adjusts the number of deaths registered by 13 September 2022 to account for registration delays
uses a +/- two-week baseline (average daily deaths excluding COVID-19 across the 14 non-heat-period days before and after each heat-period)

So unlike the ONS, the UKHSA adjust the number of deaths to supposedly account for registration delays, they focus only on the over 65s and, crucially, they do not use a set baseline; they employ a constantly shifting baseline comprised of the 14 days before and after each heat period! Why the hell do that? In my opinion, it renders their results basically meaningless and certainly very difficult to compare with excess deaths during other years, which the media does, explicitly pointing out that the number of excess deaths was the highest “since the introduction of the heatwave plan for England in 2004.” So what? That statement is meaningless when the baseline they are referencing is not average excess heat period deaths measured over several years, but an average based on a couple of weeks before and after the excess deaths occurred! Absurd. They may argue that this gives a more accurate, real-time estimate of the impact of the specific heat period but I’m fairly sure there are many confounding influences which might muddy this simple picture.

The ONS analysis is even more intriguing. Here’s their graph of excess mortality during heat periods for the years 2016-22.

You will note that 2022 doesn’t stand out at all as being particularly unusual. 2021 does though. There might be a few more deaths added during September, but it’s not going to make a great deal of difference. here is what the ONS say:

From June to September each year, the average number of deaths per day was higher on heat-period than non-heat-period days. This was largest in 2021 (191 more deaths on heat-period than non-heat-period days on average) which saw a record high temperature of 32.2°C on 22 July 2021. Data for 2022 are to August and subject to registration delays. While ONS expect around 92.3% of deaths occurring during this time have been registered (based on 2012 to 2021), comparisons of 2022 with previous years should be treated with caution.

Wait, what? “Record high temperature of 32.2C on 22 July 2021”. It wasn’t a record in any sense of the word; that just happened to be the highest daily maximum temperature recorded all summer, which is hardly outstanding as English summers go! In fact, summer 2021 was pretty average, especially in comparison to summer 2022 where England saw temperature in excess of 35C on quite a few days and recorded 40+C on the 19th July at several widely separated stations in southern and eastern England. So if very high temperatures are killing people, we would expect 2022 to record more deaths than 2021, notwithstanding adjustments for humidity, but I doubt there was a significant difference between the two summers as regards that particular aspect. Why did a lot more people die in 2021?

The report gives a lot of confusing data about 2022 and various other years, but for a comparison of 2022 with 2021, in the context of the five year period 2016-2021, we have the following:

3,271 excess deaths have been recorded during heat-periods in 2022 in England and Wales. This is an average of 82 excess deaths per day, and 6.2% higher than the five-year average.

The heat-period with the largest number of excess deaths was H2 (10 to 25 July) with 2,227 excess deaths (10.4% above average), an average of 139 excess deaths per day.

From 2016 to 2021, deaths were above the five-year average in every heat-period, with a total of 12,598 excess deaths (9.3% above average, 119 average excess deaths per day).

In England, from 2016 to 2021, observed deaths were above the five-year average in every heat-period, with excess deaths ranging from 149 (28 to 30 June 2019) to 1,858 (16 to 23 July 2021). This was not the case for Wales, where excess ranged from 29 deaths below average (2 to 9 August 2018) to 185 deaths above average (16 to 23 July 2021)

So, in 2021, there were 1858+185 (=2043) excess deaths in England and Wales from 16-23 July (8 days). This gives a daily excess death rate of 2043/8=255. Compare this to 10-25 July 2022 when the daily excess was 139. So, we must ask the question: why were so many more people dying in 2021 during a heat period in mid July (which was a lot less severe and prolonged than the heat period in mid July 2022)? If it was primarily heat stress which was killing people, this doesn’t make sense.

It gets even more confusing when the ONS reveal that it is only over 70s who experienced these excess death rates during heat periods in 2022 and in fact, people under 70 generally were less likely to die than expected. Here is the graph of excess deaths for summer 2022 divided into those aged 70 and older and those under 70.

You can clearly see that even during the peak heat period, excess deaths of under 70s barely rose above the 5 year average and were below average for most of the time, whereas deaths in the over 70s were soaring. How does that work?

Sure, older people are generally more susceptible to heat stress, thus might be expected to succumb at a greater rate than younger people, but we were told that with 40C+ temperatures, even the young would be dropping dead from heat stress. That’s what they said. In their thousands they said. In fact, it was the UKHSA who were saying that even the fit and healthy would succumb. Now they’re telling us it was only the over 65s.

Thousands of people could die in the coming heatwave, experts have warned, as the government triggered the first ever national emergency heat red alert with a record 40C (104F) temperature forecast for south-east England on Tuesday.

The level 4 heat alert announced for Monday and Tuesday by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) means “illness and death may occur among the fit and healthy, and not just in high-risk groups”.

My general impression is that heatwave deaths in 2022 are being hyped for political reasons during a period when excess deaths in general are running very high and have been doing so even outside of so called climate changed heatwaves. It is clear that there is some link between heat stress and death but it is not at all obvious that heat stress is the main cause of mortality. Something was killing a lot of people during the unremarkable summer of 2021. It wasn’t degrees Celsius. I wonder what it was?

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Accelerated western European heatwave trends linked to more-persistent double jets over Eurasia

COVID Reset: The Day of Reckoning Is Coming — Undercurrents

Heatwave Deaths Propaganda

If heat kills, why did a lot more people die in summer 2021 compared to 2022?

4.Impact of methodological differences