Attribution Studies Don’t Prove Anything About South Africa’s Floods, Phys.org
By
Linnea Lueken
July 31, 2025
A recent post at Phys.org claims that a recent attribution study shows that climate change made April 2022’s flooding in South Africa, “significantly” worse. This is an unfalsifiable (not able to be proven or disproven experimentally or observationally) claim that ignores the complexities of weather, and relies on distinctly unreliable computer modelling.
The article, titled “Climate change significantly worsened deadly 2022 Durban floods, study shows,” goes over an attribution study that focused on flooding in Durban, South Africa, three years ago. Phys.org claims the study “shows that rainfall during the storm of 11–12 April 2022 was between 40 percent and 107 percent heavier than it would have been in a cooler, pre-industrial climate.”
How do they know this? They don’t, rather they claim it based on computer model outputs.
Unlike most coverage of attribution science, Phys.org vaguely hints at the fact that the modelling is less than bulletproof, explaining that the models “simulated the storm in both today’s warmed climate and a counterfactual world without human-induced global warming.”
https://climaterealism.com/2025/07/attribution-studies-dont-prove-anything-about-south-africas-floods-phys-org/
