Climate change and the noble lie
The Observatory
2 Apr 2025
Written By Dr David Whitehouse
Boosted by climate change?
At what point does science reporting stop being news and become propaganda peddled by uncritical journalists who read off press releases from approved providers with no critical assessment of what they are relaying to the public? If you pay attention to how climate science is reported in the media you will have noticed how much of it is related to climate attribution studies. This is when a particular extreme weather event is studied and then said to have been made much worse by human climate change. Sometimes it is said to have been impossible without climate change.
Take the LA wildfires. They were made 35% more likely because of human climate change. It must be true: the BBC said so, and so did almost everyone else.
The basis for this claim is an estimation of what the climate would have been without any human-induced changes. This is compared with the climate as it actually is. Then follows some statistical calculations and violà, a result appears. The event was, say, twice as likely to have happened because of human-induced climate change.
However academically pure the initial intentions of this line of study were at its dawn about a decade ago, it has changed. Over the years, the field came to be driven by more politics, and with a desperation alien to science. It has come to symbolise media manipulation and, by some scientists, exhibits a lack of conscience. I say ‘lack of conscience’ because I know of scientists who see the results of climate attribution spread alarmingly across the media, yet keep quiet about their distrust of the attribution procedure. Why do they do this?
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/climate-attribution-noble-lie
