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Thursday, December 29, 2022

No, The Climate Change Allegations Have No Basis in Fact

If there's one thing I see over and over looking at published "science" stories in the news is confounding causation with correlations.  Pardon if I sound like a broken record, but correlation is not proof of causation.  Yes it's true (and obviously so) that if two things aren't correlated there can be no link to causation, but the leap from correlation to causation is an extremely large jump to make.  I've written about spurious correlations many times, like this post, with a great table of spurious correlations from Five Thirty Eight.  

Look at the table above; I don't think anyone thinks eating egg rolls causes people to buy a dog, or that eating a fried, breaded fish causes someone to become a Democrat, but the correlation is there to a "Wee P" value as William Briggs likes to say.  The last one is the most absurd; could anyone honestly believe that eating cabbage could turn an outie bellybutton to an innie?  It clearly meets the Wee P value test, which ordinarily set to say if p < 0.05 it's a good correlation, not a random event.

Where I'm going with this is the never ending series of articles we see that link "climate change" (or whatever they're calling it this week) to bad things.  Weather has stopped happening; there's no such thing as a "colder than usual" cold snap like we just had, or a drier season that we might want to have to water our gardens for us; it's all a harbinger of what climate change is going to bring.  

Let's assume that there really is global warming for a moment (and I think the hard evidence of that is pretty sparse and low quality).  Further, let's say it has been going on since the beginning of the industrial age as some warmunistas argue.  That means that every trend in the world since the beginning of the industrial age correlates with climate change.  Every.  Single.  Thing.   Places that have gotten colder, places that have gotten hotter, people getting taller, or heavier; every single trend whether good or bad that doesn't look like random noise correlates with climate change.  

The inspiration for harping on this comes from a paper (pdf, but short at 4 pages) published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the Heartland Institute, Energy & Environment Legal Institute, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), in response to an observation that the climate alarmist organizations are donating money to news organizations to emphasize their viewpoint.  

Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein, for example in his recent article “New abnormal: Climate disaster damage ‘down’ to $268 billion,” reported this about the estimated costs of damage due to climate change during 2022:

“This past year has seen a horrific flood that submerged one-third of Pakistan, one of the three costliest U.S. hurricanes on record, devastating droughts in Europe and China, a drought-triggered famine in Africa and deadly heat waves all over.... Weather disasters, many but not all of them turbocharged by human-caused climate change, are happening so frequently that this year’s onslaught, which 20 years ago would have smashed records by far, now in some financial measures seems a bit of a break from recent years.”

The paper then goes on to cover nine headlines, starting out with the floods in Pakistan, Hurricane Ian, and the rest.  All of them are in the realm of normal weather.  We talked about Hurricane Ian here, and how it was an outlier in a relatively inactive season.  The Accumulated Cyclone Energy, a product of strength of the storms and the amount of time they existed, was about 75% of a typical season.  The Atlantic basin produced zero named storms between July 3 and August 31. That was the first time since 1941 that the Atlantic had no named storm activity during this period. The researchers at NOAA and other agencies have looked into the connection between climate change and hurricane frequency or intensity and have steadfastly said there is none.

Last words to the quoted paper:

Regardless of one’s view of what passes as “climate science,” the good news is that even researchers who believe that “climate change” is a problem acknowledge that the number of weather-related deaths and the cost of weather-related damage are actually on the decline – despite ever-increasing emissions and whatever slight warming may be occurring.

 

 

9 comments:

  1. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/882:_Significant
    Green Jelly Beans Linked to Acne!

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  2. The leftist proved long ago that facts are irrelevant. Appealing to and control of the emotions of the heaving brainless masses is the path to power.

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  3. sunshine is linked to global warming 1.0000

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    1. But there is no money to be had in that situation. Never forget that correlation is not causation. And also never forget how much massaging of data is done to "PROVE" AGW!

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  4. Climate change is real, why 15000 years ago there was permanent ice caps in Minnesota. Of course the geological records indicate we will revert to ice within another 5000 years. You just have to have the right prospective.

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  5. I saw a table about maybe 10 or 20 years ago that showed we had some very predictable weather patterns for the last 50 years or so, and now it's reasserting more variability.

    "Climate Change" my shiny white hiney - climate ALWAYS changes. Most rational people call it WEATHER.

    /rant OFF

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  6. And other planets are warming up, too. It's almost like the models are incomplete . . .

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