Heatwave Hysteria Strikes Again
by Ben Pile 24 June 2025 9:00 AM
Spring in Britain (or at least the parts of it I have visited) was one of the best I can remember. Farmers have complained about it being a bit dry (in contrast to recent years being extremely wet), but for the rest of us, the warm but mild temperatures and fresh conditions were welcome. Early summer has also brought us some exceptionally nice weather. But towards the end of last week, the heatwave began to intensify. And rather than allowing us to bask in the glorious rays of a flaming June, the miserabilists were mobilised to pour misery on our delight. What we were enjoying, claimed these green grinches, were portents of doom. People were going to be killed by it. But this echo of Greta’s I-want-you-to-panic catechism lacks objective, scientific foundation.
The first and most ridiculous of this species of claim was that produced by the go-to outfit for every obedient climate journalist, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group, largely based out of Imperial College (of dodgy Covid mortality projections fame, using very similar methods). ‘Deadly weekend heat in England “100 times more likely” due to climate crisis,’ proclaimed the Guardian’s Environment Editor Damian Carrington, following the WWA’s analysis. But ‘attribution’ of weather events to anthropogenic climate change is profoundly unsafe, and indeed, unscientific. It is a media stunt, intended to drive commentary, not reveal knowledge about weather.
‘Attribution’ owes very little to objectivity and fact. Rather than basing estimates of the influence of a warmer planet on observational evidence, researchers like those at the WWA instead compare the outputs of computer simulations with different starting points for atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The “100 times more likely” claim emerges from the comparison of the outputs produced by the two simulations. This is unscientific, because simulations are not the real world; the simulations include all of the assumptions that ideologically-motivated researchers programme into them. Ideology in, ideology out. Actual science requires a comparison of a hypothesis’s claims against evidence obtained by observational evidence – experiment. WWA is consequently little more than a machine for producing BBC and Guardian propaganda articles.
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/06/24/heatwave-hysteria-strikes-again/
