Empirically unsupported reflexive climate attribution

An excellent post from The Politics of Our Climate Attribution Obsession by Roger Pielke Jr..  The sub-heading is "Linking disasters to climate change is typically about more than just interesting science."

This drives me crazy and is among the many reasons I no longer watch TV news or listen to radio news.  It is a Pavlovian condition that anything to do with weather engenders a response to link it to anthropogenic global warming.  Weather is not climate.  Climate is always changing.  Land use and built environment are far more relevant to weather damage than climate change.

These are simple and straightforward facts.  Yet today's heavy rain, tornadoes or elevated heat or unusual coolness can never be spoken of without invoking Climate Change.  "He whose name may not be spoken" creates one set of challenges.  "That which we must constantly invoke" creates different challenges.  It just doesn't stop.

A) It is ignorant and anyone constantly genuflecting to this altar of fanatic conviction degrades their own brand and B) It erodes confidence in news media.

Pielke points out that the known facts do not support this constant refrain.

Far from being a “new normal”, on tornadoes the recent IPCC assessment report is quite clear on the state of detection of trends and attribution:

• “observational trends in tornadoes, hail, and lightning associated with severe convective storms are not robustly detected” 

• “attribution of certain classes of extreme weather (e.g., tornadoes) is beyond current modelling and theoretical capabilities  

• “how tornadoes or hail will change is an open question”

Consider also that according to data from the U.S. National Weather Service from 2000 to 2020 only four of the strongest category of tornadoes were observed (which are labelled as F/EF5 tornadoes) In comparison, from 1954 to 1974 36 (!) such powerful tornadoes were observed. Our research on tornado damage in the United States over many decades shows a decline that is suggestive of an actual decline in tornado incidence.

Based on the IPCC assessment of the literature, along with the underlying data and research, the only scientifically valid answer to the question of whether greenhouse gas emissions and associated climate change are leading to more or more intense tornado outbreaks — a “new normal” — is that neither tornadoes nor the most intense tornadoes have increased since at least the 1950s. There are of course other dimensions of the climatology of tornadoes worth paying attention to -- such as seasonality, geographical variability, and relationships with modes of climate variability like El Niño and La Niña. These many different characteristics are highly variable and may also be influenced by human-caused climate change.

It is not just a self-debasing claim.  It has real consequences by diverting us from real actions that can be taken today to militate and mitigate weather destruction.

They [Lahsen and Ribot ] do however warn that the politics of promoting attribution are not without consequences: “Climate-centric disaster framing is politically useful to actors with interest in diverting attention from local, national and international policy initiatives that might bring—or could have brought—more direct and locally relevant remedial action.”

So every time you hear or read a claim about this or that disaster being linked to climate change, as interesting as the underlying science may be, what is actually being conveyed is a stealthy promotional message encouraging you to consider climate change to be important and thus to support efforts to decarbonize the economy. As important as these messages are, what they leave out are all of those actions that are important for actually reducing the future impacts of extremes, regardless the particular details of a climate change influence.

Read the whole piece for additional content and worthy links..

As the old adage had it, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.  Especially to an ideological fixation which causes empirically unsupported reflexive climate attribution.