Last month a small but powerful cyclone named Chido made landfall in Mayotte before sweeping into Mozambique, causing considerable damage and leading to the loss of around 100 lives. Days after the tragedy, the Green Blob-funded Carbon Brief noted that scientists have “long suggested” that climate change is making cyclones worse in the region, while Blob-funded World Weather Attribution (WWA) at Imperial College London made a near-instant and curiously precise estimate that a Chido-like cyclone was about 40% more likely to happen in 2024 than during the pre-industrial age. Not to be outdone, Green Blob-funded cheerleader the Guardian chipped in with the obligatory “cyclones are getting worse because of the climate emergency”. Almost unnoticed, it seems, among all the Net Zero dooming and grooming was a science paper published during December by Nature that found no increase in the destructive power of cyclones – the generic term for typhoons and hurricanes – in any ocean basin over the last 30 years. In the South Indian basin, the location of cyclone Chido, there was a dramatic decrease in both frequency and duration in recent times.
Reality rarely gets much of a look-in these days when fanatical Net Zero activism is afoot, but the paper, written by a group of Chinese meteorologists, makes its case by considering the facts and the data. The scientists apply a “power dissipation index” (PDI) which they consider superior to single measure indicators since it combines storm intensity, duration and frequency. The graphs below show the cumulative index for tropical cyclones across all ocean basins along with a global indication.
Downward trends in the cumulative PDI can be seen in a number of Pacific regions, while the trend holds steady in the North Atlantic. The southern Indian ocean downward trend is particularly pronounced while the overall global line is also heading in a similar direction.
So why does all this scientific twaddle get written by the green activists in mainstream media? Much of it arises from the new pseudoscience that claims it can tie individual weather events to human-caused climate change. Press releases peddling climate Armageddon are issued days after a natural disaster and are eagerly reprinted by activist journalists promoting the Net Zero fantasy. The distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr. is a fierce critic of this new pseudoscience, which he calls weather attribution alchemy. In a recent Substack post in the aftermath of Chido, he noted that the WWA at Imperial College simply assumes the conclusion that it seeks to prove by accepting that every storm is made stronger because of warmer oceans. Using this explanation, continues Pielke, it is straightforward to conclude that the storm was made more likely due to climate change. Or as Imperial states: “The difference in the storm intensity and likelihood of this storm intensity between the counterfactual climate and today’s climate can be attributed to climate change.”
As the new Chinese paper shows, the matter is not quite so simple. Pielke notes that tropical storms encounter numerous environmental influences such as vertical wind shear and storm-induced ocean surface cooling, even when they remain over warmer waters. “Such complexities mean that simple storyline attribution – warmer oceans predictably mean stronger storms – is inappropriate when used to characterise the behaviour of individual storms,” he argues. Pielke also comes down hard on the statistical evidence backing the WWA claims. Even if storms such as Chido were more likely in the future, it would take a very long time to detect a significant change using the threshold 90% confidence set down by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). And by very long time, he means thousands of years.
“Perhaps that is why assumptions are favoured over evidence,” suggests Pielke.
There were plenty of assumptions on display in a now routine end-of-year weather report from the BBC headed: ‘A year of extreme weather that challenged billions.‘ Written by Esme Stallard, it claims that record-breaking heat brought extreme weather including hurricanes and month-long droughts. Pride of place is given to Dr. Friederike Otto, lead of WWA and Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at Imperial, who claimed: “We are living in a dangerous new era – extreme weather caused unrelenting suffering.” “The impacts of fossil fuel warming has never been clear or more devastating than in 2024,” she added.
The redoubtable Paul Homewood is unimpressed with Stallard’s opening line about increasing extreme weather and has filed a complaint with the BBC. Stallard goes on to list a handful of random events, “but fails to provide any evidence that these are anything other than natural events which happen all the time”, states Homewood. “Nor is any evidence provided that such events have been getting more frequent or extreme over time,” he adds.
The BBC story highlighted typhoons in the Philippines as well as hurricane Beryl and stated that such events may be increasing in intensity due to climate change. Official data do not show any evidence of them becoming more powerful over time, notes Homewood. Much play was made of a recent drought in the Amazon, but Homewood points out that the World Bank Climate Portal reveals that rainfall has increased in the area by 5% over the last 30 years. Throughout the report, observes Homewood, the BBC bases its claims on weather attribution computer models. “However, computer models are not evidence, and can be manipulated to provide whatever results are desired. That is why they are widely derided by the wider scientific community,” he states.
For Roger Pielke, extreme weather attributions are “puzzling”. The most charitable explanation for their proliferation is that there is a demand for them, including from many in the media. The demand will be filled by someone, he concludes. “A less charitable explanation is that there is a systematic effort underway to contest and undermine actual climate science, including the assessments of the IPCC, in order to present a picture of reality that is simply false in support of climate advocacy. We might call that pseudo-scientific gaslighting,” he suggests.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Thank goodness we know the reliability of modelling from the events surrounding COVID.
[sarcasm]
NASA GISS ModelE has a subroutine which introduces uniform noise into its simulations. To misquote Einstein, God does not play die.
Report 9 was not internally consistent and was not supported by the facts. It didn’t ‘predict’ anything, we’re told. No, ‘we would expect’; the epidemic ‘is predicted’ and under certain circumstances ‘we would predict’. Gaslighting.
By predicting (in the conventional sense of the word) ‘510,000 deaths’ with the peak ‘after approximately 3 months’ they had pretty much nailed down the timing and size of the epidemic in the UK. Their ‘Figure 1A’ shows the GB peak hitting something like 22,000 deaths per day which therefore sets the duration of the epidemic. An epidemic can be either ‘tall and thin’ or ‘low and wide’ and encompass the same number of victims. By setting the height (max deaths per day) and the area (total number of deaths) they’ve made a very specific prediction which limits the duration of the epidemic. By setting the date of the peak at ‘3 months’ from some start point their prediction could hardly be more specific. Only one minor problem. If it was accurate we should have been seeing 1,000s of deaths by the time they published their report – and we hadn’t.
There’s computer modelling for you. Maybe worth comparing with reality sooner rather than later.
“Perhaps that is why assumptions are favoured over evidence…”
…True to form for anything coming out of London’s Imperialist College, home of world-leading experts in Telling Other People What To Do.
Witness Imperial College Report Number 9, published with no external review 16 March 2020, the useful idiocy pandering to The Pandemic That Never Was, featuring the word “assume” (or derivative thereof) over 40 times.
Assumptions, assumptions, assumptions, apart from the missing assumptions about intensive care wards, care homes and itinerant staff.
A [rather terrifying] company training officer in the late 1970s told me in no uncertain terms “You should never assume anything.” Her words have regularly come back to me over the years.
“Much play was made of a recent drought in the Amazon.”
Link to a scholarly paper published last year…
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/36/20/JCLI-D-23-0146.1.xml
“…Proxy tree-ring and historical evidence for precipitation extremes during the pre-instrumental nineteenth century indicate that recent floods and droughts on the Amazon River may have not yet exceeded the range of natural hydroclimatic variability.”
If I recall the paper correctly, historical evidence included interrogating digitised Brazilian newspaper and other written records, in a valiant attempt to calibrate the degree of 19th century drought and flood in the Amazon basin. True scholarship is alive and well at the University of Arkansas.
So, they say, we saw what you did there. You have defined a new metric (PDI) that allows you to make your case. We prefer to continue to use the proven and mutable techniques of the virtual world (modeling) over a system that takes into consideration actual influences on storm behaviour.
In the same manner we will continue to forecast dire weather for the UK based on worst case scenarios in remote and exposed locations.
OK I guess I am being a bit thick here but can someone please tell me what a ‘counterfactual climate’ is?
Also i refuse to believe anything that comes out of ICL.
This confirms Steven Koonin in his 2021 book Unsettled in the chapter Tempest Terrors. It is hard going to read but worth it. The problem is most can take in a simple BBC headline lie but to find out the real science requires some thought.
No one gives anything Imperial says any credence since Neil Ferguson and Covid.
But be careful…the reduction in number and severity of these incidents….climate change….