Do Climate Attribution Studies Tell the Full Story?
How a cascade of selection effects bias the collective output of extreme event attribution studies. 🧵

breakthroughjournal.org/p/do-climate-a… Over the past decades, there has been an explosion in Extreme Event Attribution (EEA) studies focusing on (“triggered by”) some prior notable weather or climate extreme.

In a 2nd Trump presidency, rather than doubling down on the misguided notion that science is an authority that can fully dictate policy, scientists should strive to delineate between strict scientific facts and their political preferences. 🧵

breakthroughjournal.org/p/a-second-tru…

2023 set a record for global temperature in the instrumental era, breaching the 1.5°C 'limit' for the first time.

But global temperature itself is not very relevant to impacts. So where did 2023 come in, in terms of those more impact-relevant climate changes? 🧵 The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society released its annual "State of the Climate" report last month. Below, I highlight some of their cataloged trends, ranking them roughly from intuitive to more surprising.

California’s Massive Park Fire Would be Less Severe if We Proactively Reduced Fuels.🧵

The Park Fire shows that both a lack of active management on US Forest Service land and land management optimized for timber production are far from ideal for wildfire safety. As of today, August 14th, the Park Fire has burned nearly 430,000 acres (672 square miles), or about 65% of the size of the state of Rhode Island. It is officially still only 40% contained and has destroyed over 600 structures.

fire.ca.gov/incidents/2024…

Is climate change driving massive increases in severe thunderstorm costs and causing “The Possible Collapse of the U.S. Home Insurance System” as @nytimes reports?

There is a large and growing gap between climate science and the reporting coming from 'climate desks'…🧵 It is true that both US billion-dollar disasters and global insured disaster losses are increasing, and a large fraction of the overall increase seems to be driven by increases in losses from severe thunderstorms.

ncei.noaa.gov/access/billion…

Flooding is now often reported on as proof of a new era of climate-related catastrophes. But is this correct?

liberalpatriot.com/p/are-floods-d…






When considering the risk of natural disasters like floods, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has adopted a useful framework for breaking down the risk of impacts.

I have a piece out today in The Chronicle of Higher Education on how social and career incentives surrounding researchers cause a good portion of the full story on the climate problem to be left out of the high-impact literature. 🧵
chronicle.com/article/does-c… I also recently gave a seminar for the Energy Policy and Climate Program at Johns Hopkins University (where I am a lecturer) that covers the same topic:

Even if temperatures return to the middle of the climate model projection envelope by the late 2020s, we still expect temperatures like those seen in 2023 to be commonplace in the 2030s...



🧵

https://x.com/PatrickTBrown31/status/1715387117105184858?s=20

Thus, any drastic change in weather at the regional level (like in the US) associated with this level of global warmth would be quite concerning when considering climate impacts over the coming decades.

Last week, I described our paper on climate change and wildfires:



I am very proud of this research overall. But I want to talk about how molding research presentations for high-profile journals can reduce its usefulness & actually mislead the public.

https://twitter.com/PatrickTBrown31/status/1696910491786858571?s=20

For climate research, I think the crux of the issue is highlighted here in my thread:

https://twitter.com/PatrickTBrown31/status/1696910508924776791?s=20

We have a paper out today in @Nature on the role that human-caused climate change is playing in changes in extreme wildfire behavior, at the daily timescale, in California.

nature.com/articles/s4158…
Many previous studies have looked at the influence of climate change on wildfires in California, the US West, and around the world. However, most previous studies have focused on *conditions conducive* to wildfires rather than characteristics of wildfires themselves.

I have a paper out today highlighting an error in the climate impacts literature that leads to major exaggerations of the influence of climate change on extreme weather impacts.

link.springer.com/article/10.100… This error originated in the journal Nature, has been endorsed by the IPCC, and it undergirds some of the most attention-grabbing headlines assigning deaths and dollars to climate change. For example, the error provides the foundation for the following headlines:

When extreme precipitation or a drought occurs, it is often reflexively reported to have been “made worse,” “intensified,” or “driven” by climate change.

But could it have been made less intense by climate change? How confident are we in the influence of increased greenhouse gasses on changes in extreme precipitation and droughts? It turns out, not very confident.

We use climate models to assess the influence of increased greenhouse gas concentrations on weather events.

I have had many threads pushing back against mainstream narratives that portray climate change as having an apocalyptic impact on *people* and happening *currently*.

A couple colleagues have asked me why I choose to focus on this... The main reasons that I feel compelled to focus on correcting these apocalyptic narratives are that I think they:

The IPCC Report on the Impacts of Climate Change is Depressing

But not for the reasons you might think.

thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-ag… I have been reading the IPCC's Chapter 5 of Working Group 2 (WG2) on food fiber and other ecosystem products. These WG2 chapters inform the synthesis report which was released last week and produced quite dramatic coverage like this.

My background is in meteorology, but I now mainly study climate change impacts on society. I notice a significant difference in goals between these fields.

In meteorology, the goal is often to identify the most critical drivers of phenomena to better understand how they work... In contrast, in climate change impacts research, the goal is often to identify the most critical drivers only so that they can be "controlled for" or ignored, allowing one to highlight the hidden impact of climate change.

Damaging flooding in the US caused by extreme rainfall is often covered as if it has taken on a new character b/c of global warming. But do historical trends in extreme rainfall show that there has been a massive increase in magnitude? No, not really. Let’s take a look. Global warming’s general enhancement of extreme precipitation is widely accepted due to the fundamental physics that warmer air holds more water vapor. But ‘enhancement’ just refers to the direction of change, not the magnitude.

I was reading the UN World Food Program site & came across a remarkable claim that is made in an attempt to attribute hunger to climate change. They list as a "fact" that

"Extreme weather events have increased five-fold over the past 50 years."

🤦‍♂️🧵

wfpusa.org/articles/14-fa… As someone who has developed and taught a university class on changes in extreme weather under climate change, I was very surprised to see such a large number (five-fold) being claimed. It would not be consistent with any analysis I am aware of.

45% of young people say feelings about climate change negatively impact their daily lives (nature.com/articles/d4158…).

Climate change must be dealt with, but I think a cascade of filtering effects are giving people a distorted view of the current magnitude of impacts on people The process of turning raw data into public knowledge in climate-related fields has many selection/filtering effects that screen specifically for information that ends up giving the most dramatic and negative impressions to the public.

We are watching the possibility of an intense cold air outbreak over the Midwest/East near Christmas. When events like this happen, there will inevitably be coverage that frames the extreme cold as being due to climate change. This will be ignoring IPCC consensus conclusions. The type of extreme change that the IPCC and the National Academy express the MOST confidence in is the WARMING of extreme cold (cold extremes becoming LESS extreme). These organizations express even MORE confidence in the warming of extreme cold than the warming of extreme heat.

One major narrative coming out of COP27 is that a primary victory was the establishment of the loss and damages fund, while a primary failure was the lack of a commitment to ban things like international development financing of fossil fuel projects. When it comes to the loss of life from extreme temperatures, I think the evidence shows that the supposed victory may end up being a failure, and supposed failure is really a victory.

thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/…

I listened to two @nytimes The Daily podcasts on topics related to climate change and hurricanes this week. Both give the overwhelming impression that we have seen substantial increases in hurricane strength/frequency. That’s just not true. The first podcast, with @cflav, is about Hurricane Ian and its repercussions on the insurance industry and, thus, real estate in Florida.

nytimes.com/2022/10/18/pod…