By Paul Homewood
You may recall this BBC report in January:
Climate change was a major factor behind the hot, dry weather that gave rise to the devastating LA fires, a scientific study has confirmed.
It made those weather conditions about 35% more likely, according to World Weather Attribution – globally recognised for their studies linking extreme weather to climate change.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd9qy4knd8wo
As I pointed out at the time, the WWA claims were contradicted by that inconvenient thing, actual data!
Now the Daily Sceptic’s Chris Morrison reveals that the authors of the WWA paper that their findings were statistically insignificant, in other words indistinguishable from natural variability. He writes:
“Climate change was a major factor behind the recent Los Angeles wildfires, reported Matt McGrath of the BBC last January. According to a ‘scientific study’ instantly produced by World Weather Attribution (WWA), the prevailing weather conditions were made about 35% more likely due to humans using hydrocarbons. The WWA study, according to the trusting McGrath, is said to confirm this somewhat precise attribution of blame. Possibly the BBC and most of the mainstream that also parroted the WWA line might consider some corrective copy in the light of a devasting critique of the claims from the theoretical physicist, science writer and prominent youtuber Dr Sabine Hossenfelder. In a YouTube video broadcast here that has gone viral on social media, she elicited an astonishing admission from one of the report’s authors that, “as you can see from the numbers, the changes in intensity and likelihood are unsurprisingly not statistically significant”.
Not statistically significant is exactly what Hossenfelder found since she noted that the figures supplied by the WWA were within a 95% statistical probability level. Her broadcast goes into detail about the numbers falling within the 95% level meaning that an alternative explanation is that climate change had no part to play in the LA fires. In fact Hossenfelder was so appalled by the work that she was inclined to be harsh in her conclusions. “It is so bad that I have sincere doubts that even the authors read it”, she says, adding it was so bad that “it is actually quite funny”. Wondering why other scientists don’t complain, she notes: “Whenever there is some crap going around the media, they look away and keep their mouths shut”.
Read the full story here.