There is no doubt that attribution claims have run far out ahead of detection of trends
"Since 1951, the number of heavy rainfall days per year for the whole of Germany has hardly changed, almost independently of their definition" mdpi.com/2073-4441/12/7…
I'm not sure how the current strong attribution claims (it's obvious, right?) can be reconciled with the observational data, but I'm sure there is an explanation
If certain extreme events have become much more likely, then evidence should show them being more likely? Or not?
Here is what the US NCA 2017 said about "attribution without detection"
Decreases the chances that you'll miss identifying a climate signal in a rare event, but increases the chances of falsely identifying such a signal
It turns out -- and science scholars will love this -- the choice of methodology, and thus choice of result, depends upon the message one wishes to convey
"More meaningful questions" take us back to the good ol' IPCC detection and attribution framework
As I have argued often, if conventional IPCC detection & attribution work showed clearly increasing extremes & plausible causes, then the post-modern "event attribution" methods would be unnecessary forbes.com/sites/rogerpie…
IPCC D&A methods have identified trends & causes in (many regions) for extreme temps & precip with various levels of confidence
But not tropical cyclones, floods, drought, tornadoes
So enter "event attribution" to fill the gap
Why? Explained below via NYT to win a PR battle
I can think of no other area of research where the relaxing of rigor and standards has been encouraged by researchers in order to generate claims more friendly to headlines, political advocacy and even lawsuits . . .
But there you go
/END
PS. There is an absolutely awesome STS dissertation to be written based on this thread. Career prospects might be limited though 😎
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A time series of base (i.e., current-year) loses was first compiled from annual reports published in the Monthly Weather Review by Chris Landsea in 1989 for 1949-1989
I extended the data using same methods to 1996
Chris and I extended back to 1900 for Pielke and Landsea 1998
Then, Pielke et al. 2008 extend the dataset to 2005, again using the same methods
The heavy lifting was done by my then-student Joel Gratz
Joel graduated and went to an insurance company called ICAT . . .
Last month I revealed based on files part of the public record of the Michael Mann trial how Mann coordinated peer review of a paper of mine to ensure that it "would not see the light of day"
I only had a snippet of the relevant Mann email
Now I have the whole thing
And JFC...
First
New: the editor of GRL, Jay Familigetti, originally sent our submission to Mann!
That's right
A paper by Pielke & @ClimateAudit was sent to Mann to peer review
Mann wisely didn't accept but instead recommended hostile reviewers so that "it would not see the light of day"
@ClimateAudit Mann emails his partners Caspar Amann (NCAR) and Gavin Schmidt (NASA) to express his glee that this gives him an opportunity to cause harm
🧵
"The U.S. installed 1,700 miles of new high-voltage transmission miles per year on average in the first half of the 2010s but dropped to only 645 miles per year on average in the second half of the 2010s"
The US has 240,000 miles of high voltage transmission capacity
An expansion of 645 miles/year is just about 0.3%/yr
Take that 0.3%/year HV grid expansion to the next Tweet
The Princeton study (@JesseJenkins) used to promote the Inflation Reduction Act claimed the HV grid has been expanding at a rate of 1% per year based on a newsletter from JP Morgan
That 1% is >3x greater than actual recent grid expansion rates of 0.3%