The Wrong Sort of Hurricane
Why experts get it wrong, and why they can always tell you why
Posted on 25 Sep 24
by John RidgwayIn Uncategorized
My wife keeps telling me I should be more dog — I should just live in the moment, stop reflecting on the past and let the future take care of itself. But I can’t help it. My past is too full of mishap to be comfortably ignored, and I have no reason to believe that the future will be any different; therefore, I worry about it. And whilst I have no great expertise to bring to bear that enables me to predict the precise nature of my fate, there is certainly no shortage of experts around who delight in filling in the picture for me. One such expert is Professor Friederike Otto of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group, whose party piece is to reflect upon past calamity and come out with statements such as, “This is definitely what we will see much more of in the future”. In fact, that’s precisely what she told the world this week after storm Boris had just finished ravaging Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Austria and Italy, leading to at least 24 deaths and billions of pounds of damage. But how can she know this? The BBC explains:
Scientists at WWA work out how much of a role climate change played in an extreme weather event by comparing it with a model of how bad that storm, drought or heatwave might have been in a world where humans hadn’t been burning fossil fuels for nearly 200 years.1
And these models are very good, don’t you know, because they can fill you in with numbers:
But if warming reaches 2C, similar episodes will become an extra 5% more intense and 50% more frequent, the WWA warned.
The trouble is, however, that specific events such as storm Boris cannot be predicted by these models, and so the art is to wait until they happen, and then attach the reality of the experience to a set of scary future statistics, resulting in a mind-set that couldn’t possibly be any less dog. It is an approach that has worked very well for Professor Otto and her colleagues, and it has made a huge contribution to the zeitgeist that seems to have given the UK’s Foreign Secretary, David Lammy a free pass in declaring that “nothing could be more central to the UK’s national interest than delivering global progress on arresting rising temperatures.”2
More:
https://iowaclimate.org/2024/09/25/the-wrong-sort-of-hurricane/
