The recent floods in Spain have caused a deluge of ghoulish commentary that seeks to make political capital for climate policies out of the tragedies experienced by many thousands of people. The green claim is that manmade global warming has created a different climate, which brings more rain to the region, and hence more floods. But even if it were true that Europe faces a new climate, this understanding of floods, their causes and consequences, is completely false. And it exposes the urgent necessity of interrogating green ideology.
According to the BBC’s Matt McGrath, ‘Scientists say climate change made Spanish floods worse‘. The claim is produced by the green movement’s go-to quote-machine, Dr. Friederike Otto of Imperial College London and founder of World Weather Attribution (WWA). WWA was established by Otto and colleagues, outside of their academic work, to estimate the probability of an event being “linked to” climate change. Hence, Otto et al. are at the top of every environmental journalists’ contact list, and every extreme weather event in the world produces headlines along the same lines: ‘Scientists say climate change made X Y times more likely’.
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