Attribution and Misattribution
Willis Eschenbach
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September 11, 2025
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I came across a CNN news article headlined “Scientists trace heat waves back to individual fossil fuel companies, with potentially sweeping courtroom implications“. Yeah, right, sez I. So I went to look at the underlying study at Nature, entitled “Systematic attribution of heatwaves to the emissions of carbon majors“. Yeah, right, sez I. This is not only junk science. It’s nasty insidious junk science that the authors say is specifically designed to provide “scientific” backing for attempts to get money from the carbon majors for “heat wave damages” and the like. Of course, they ignore the fact that excess cold causes about nine times the deaths that are caused by excess heat, so warming actually reduces deaths from temperature extremes … but I digress. Now, before going any further, I want to hammer home the generally-overlooked fact that the “carbon majors” are NOT the ones emitting fossil fuel CO2. That would be you and me. ExxonMobil and Shell et al. aren’t some big emitters of CO2, that’s crazy talk. They only emit a tiny fraction of global CO2 emissions. It’s not them. I’m the one turning on the gas burner on the stove. I’m the guy burning diesel in my pickup truck. I’m the man using gas-fired electricity. Not BP. Not TotalEnergies. Not the “climate majors”. Me. Assigning blame to the “climate majors” for humans emitting CO2 by burning fossil fuels is even dumber than assigning blame to the forest for humans emitting CO2 by burning firewood. And using the mantle of “science” to try to extort money from the “carbon majors” is just inhumane. That can only INCREASE FUEL PRICES, which hurts the poor more than anyone. That’s the cruelest tax of all. So, how to best fight this dangerous misinformation? I turned to the world’s dumbest genius librarian, perplexity.ai. Now, I pay the twenty bucks a month to use the Pro version of Perplexity. But the free version works just fine. There are a couple of options on the Perplexity site, “Search” and “Research”. Here’s the dropdown info window for “Search”. Different search depths for the paid version.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/09/11/attribution-and-misattribution/
