A flood of nonsense

In other news, winter still won’t go away in large parts of the Northern Hemisphere, including Ottawa where we alternate brief warm snaps with cold waves, ice and freezing rain. And according to Heatmap, in the United States “Severe storms threaten millions with ‘generational’ flooding”.

Generational meaning such things are expected roughly once a generation, not a synonym for “unprecedented” or “clearly caused by people”. Unless you’re a climate zealot in which case (drum roll please) “As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange has reported, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is highly confident in the attributable influence of climate change on extreme rain”. Which is completely untrue. In the latest IPCC Assessment Report 6, a summary Table (#12) in Working Group 1 Chapter 12 lists in three columns how certain they are that various types of extreme weather changes attributable to greenhouse gases have, respectively, already been seen, will be seen by 2050 and will be seen by 2100. The latter two columns, to put a big fat IPCC thumb on the scale, are based on RCP8.5 scenario runs. And without getting sidetracked into the absurdity of RCP8.5, the category “Heavy precipitation and fluvial flood” is a blank.

To be precise, while they say that haven’t detected any changes and don’t expect to by 2050, they say that by 2100 under RCP8.5 they expect changes to be detected, just not ones that they can say are due to greenhouse gases. So where did Heatmap get their fake news?

If you follow the link on “Heatmap’s Jeva Lange has reported“, it’s an article on World Weather Attribution, whose torqued pseudo-science we and others have repeatedly exposed. And what WWA says about anything is a long way from what the IPCC does. Which is often irresponsible in the summaries and sometimes fairly sensible in the detailed papers, including on rainfall. And as we warned in August 2021:

“By now we are all used to the pattern associated with IPCC report releases. The press coverage is an alarmist spin on the Summary, which is an alarmist spin on the Report, which is a selective and alarmist spin on the underlying science.”

So here’s what Lange wrote about rain and the IPCC:

“This is simple, observable physics: Cold air holds less moisture, and warm air holds more. The ‘Clausius-Clapeyron’ relation, as it is known, tells us that in 1 degree C warmer air, there is 7% more moisture. All that moisture has to go somewhere, so quite literally, when it rains, it pours…. Like heat, the relationship between warm air and rainfall is well understood, which is why the IPCC is highly confident in the attributable influence of climate change on extreme rain. While it may seem confusing that both droughts and intense rainfall are symptoms of climate change, the warming atmosphere seems to increase precipitation variability, making events on the extreme margins more likely and more frequent. Increased precipitation can have counterintuitive results, though. Rain occurring over fewer overall days due to bursts of extreme rainfall, for example, can actually worsen droughts.”

And when someone says “simple physics” with regard to climate you should always be on your guard. Because as we have again pointed out, the Clausius-Clapeyron relation is a theoretical one that does not appear to be borne out in the very complicated real world with its complex physics. Ms. Lange, alas, appears not to read our material. Not even our point that a theory that explains everything explains nothing, our jibe about the strange way climate change seems to make everything worse, or our insistence that “climate change” doesn’t have “symptoms” because it’s not a causal force, it’s a description of changes, aka of symptoms.

Or the tendency of alarmists to mistake projections for evidence. Lange herself writes:

“Because heat and moisture are necessary ingredients for these kinds of storms [“severe convective” or colloquially just thunderstorms], and because the atmosphere is getting both warmer and wetter, climate models ‘consistently’ and confidently predict an ‘increase in the frequency of severe thunderstorms,’ the IPCC notes — but, ‘there is low confidence in the details of the projected increase.’ Trends remain poorly studied and highly regionally dependent; in the United States, for example, there is still no evidence of a ‘significant increase in convective storms, and hail and severe thunderstorms.’ Still, other research suggests that for every 1.8 degree F of warming, the conditions favorable to severe convective storms will increase in frequency by up to 20%.”

So she comes right out and says the IPCC sees no evidence of a significant increase in the kinds of storms the US just had. And Heatmap cites it as proof that the IPCC said the opposite.

Here we are tempted to say that this is not how science is done. Except increasingly it is exactly how science is done. And journalism. But it’s not how they should be although rather predictably the Heatmap piece ends with… an attack on Donald Trump and an effort to rally an outraged public in defence of red tape:

“These historic spring storms are hitting as the Trump administration slashes jobs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, hampering the government’s ability to effectively forecast and respond to weather emergencies.”

And that, at least, anyone could predict with a high degree of confidence, and sarcasm.