NPR climate change follies

Anyone who sees NPR as credible, objective, science-based journalism is delusional. Here is a good example.

National Public Radio (NPR) ran a story claiming that scientists using computer models can now determine how much more severe a weather event was, or whether a particular event was likely caused by, climate change. Weather data demonstrates this claim is false. There are significant issues with the kinds of computer models that attribution scientists use to make these kinds of connections. They have yet to predict any weather event, and real-world weather data show no worsening trends amid current warming.

NPR is famously bad about spreading misinformation about climate science. Climate Realism has covered a multitude of stories debunking the fake climate new pushed by NPR, here, here, and here, for example. In fact, in the first story link listed, Climate Realism debunked a post by this very same “Science Desk” writer, Rebecca Hersher, who again misleads on the connection between weather and climate.

In her latest piece, “Researchers can now explain how climate change is affecting your weather,” Hersher says that scientists can decisively attribute different natural events—specifically heat waves, wildfires, and hurricanes—to climate change itself.

“For some types of weather, it’s become possible to say exactly how much worse it was because of climate change. Or that without global warming, the disaster would not have happened at all,” writes Hersher.

Since climate is an average of weather in a region over the span of 30 years, right away attempting to attribute individual storms to climate change is unscientific at best. Attribution research has been widely criticized for it’s inability to be repeated through testing, falsified, or measured in the real world—all necessary characteristics of science—and for the fact that predictions made by the models are based on emission scenarios that don’t match real world emission data, and are, in some instances, impossible. The climate change and temperature scenarios that weather attribution models are based on run way too hot, according to scientists, and therefore do not accurately represent current warming.

You cannot determine what the difference is between a fictional climate system and a real one—or worse, two fictional climate systems, as is the case with modern attribution science. Attribution researchers compare a a model of the what they think the Earth’s climate would be like, absent any humans in existence, to modeled scenario they create including humans but based on faulty emission and temperature assumptions. The differences between these two are what attribution modelers claim as “proof” that climate change is making weather worse.

Real world data refutes the model predictions.