News Brief by Kip Hansen —7 May 2024
World Weather Attribution, a purpose created organization intended to manufacture attention getting news stories in support of the Climate Crisis meme that “All Extreme and Bad Weather is caused by Human Induced Climate Change”, has published a report on the drought in Panama that has been affecting shipping through the Panama Canal.
“Who is World Weather Attribution (WWA)?
The WWA initiative was formed in 2015 by Dr Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Dr Friederike Otto.
Today, the core WWA team is formed by researchers from several institutions, including the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London, The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.
The core team also works with climate scientists and other experts in the country on which the study is being conducted, providing critical knowledge and insights on weather, databases, modelling and impacts.
Why are WWA studies performed rapidly?
Following an extreme weather event, people often ask: is climate change to blame?
Rapid attribution studies are carried out to give a robust, scientific answer to this question.
The results are published days or weeks after the event to inform discussions about climate change, mitigation and adaptation, while the impacts of the extreme weather event are still fresh in the minds of the public and policymakers, and decisions about rebuilding are being made.” [from the About page of the WWA ]
The acknowledged climate crisis advocacy group, Climate Central, claims responsibility and credit for the creation of the WWA. And Jessica Weinkle of The Breakthrough Institute, recently noted: “Elsewhere, the advocacy group, Climate Central, works to spread heightened views of climate change in run of the mill television weather broadcasting. Climate Central organized development of weather attribution studies fit for media rather than science. The studies are now integral to climate litigation.” [ source – a must read ]
But, as with the recent terrible drought in southern Africa, which is causing a serious humanitarian situation, there is a good problem.
That problem is that WWA, try as they might to keep to their mandate of scientifically proving (in a rather odd and invalid statistical way) that all bad weather events can and should be blamed on human-caused climate change, has been unable to do so.
Why? Simple, drought in Central America, including the Panama highlands, is dependent on the worldwide cyclical ENSO weather pattern – and specifically not on any aspect of recent slight general warming of Earth’s climate.
The disappointment is glaring obvious in the official report from WWA, which is headlined on the WWA website as: “Low water levels in Panama Canal due to increasing demand exacerbated by El Niño event”. [ The full official report is available as a free .pdf here. ]
After 8 other bullet-points highlighting reduced rainfall and increased demand on the reservoir water, WWA finally includes this:
“With neither climate model data nor a strong physical argument to support the hypothesis, we therefore cannot conclude that the observed drying is attributable to human-caused climate change.”
And while it may have disappointed Fredi Otto [“Together with climate scientist Geert Jan van Oldenborgh she founded the international project World Weather Attribution which she still leads.”], not even the reservoir’s evaporation water loss could be blamed on warmer temperatures:
“Evapotranspiration in Panama is mainly driven by wind speed, humidity and cloud cover which is in contrast to most other regions in the world, where temperature is a key driver. … the amount of water lost annually through evapotranspiration in this area is small compared to the rainfall deficits from lack of rainfall.”
All in and done, the effort to blame Panama’s rainfall troubles on climate change was a total bust.
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Author’s Comment:
Sorry, WWA, that’s two major loses in a row. Keep trying – you might be able to trick the data into showing something was maybe caused by climate change…like the rainfall in a single city in Ireland.
In my not-so-humble opinion, the WWA is, at the top, just a bunch of Climate Crisis Inc. weather panic shills, drawing on “experts” from other countries who are honored to be asked to participate in these studies and get their names added as authors on a sure-to-be published paper that will attract media attention – one of the most-sought-after forms of compensation available to today’s scientists.
But, I have been encouraged by the dilution effect. The advocacy of WWA’s founders, Fredi Otto and Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, becomes diluted through the addition of various national and local scientists who are not primarily intent on sharpening the climate crisis axe. These other scientists are much less likely to spin and stretch the data to fit the climate crisis meme. And I offer them my congratulations for refusing to bend to the pressure they must be under to do so.
Thanks for reading.
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