Extreme weather storytelling now dominates the headlines promoting the Net Zero madness, and the rush to climb on board the ‘attribution’ bandwagon proceeds apace. Reading University Professor and publicity master Ed Hawkins is famous for his temperatures stripes which brighten up the uniforms of numerous green activists, and he is now seeking a full-time researcher to provide “plausible” storylines of bad weather. These of course will be fed to all the helpful messengers in mainstream media and politics. A new “reanalyser-based” approach is to be used which is said to offer a “novel way to develop plausible storylines for some types of extreme weather events that other methods may not be suitable for”.
The use of the word “plausible” is interesting since the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “superficially fair, reasonable or valuable but often deceptively so”. Climate “reanalysers” merge weather observations with computer model outputs. In attempting to attribute bad weather to warmer climates assumed to be caused by humans they will do little more than provide a speculative explanation of unprovable validity for events in a chaotic, non-linear atmosphere that is impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy. Any “stories” that emerge would fail the fundamental Popperian principle of the scientific process in that they cannot be tested or falsified. Such stories might be true, they might be false, nobody knows, or at least can prove it – they are just opinions. Opinions, of course – as we see almost every day – that are used to promote the need for Net Zero. The BBC and the Guardian seemingly cannot get enough of them. Media climate comedy turn Jim “jail the deniers” Dale will love them.
