Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
A recent article at The Blaze, “Elena Kagan gave bogus science a blind endorsement,” says Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s glowing forward endorsing the Federal Judicial Center’s (FJC) “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence (RMSE)” was inappropriate and careless, since she has subsequently said she hadn’t read the document. The RMSE is biased, giving undo weight to so-called “scientific consensus” over empirical data.
A recent article at The Blaze, “Elena Kagan gave bogus science a blind endorsement,” says Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s glowing forward endorsing the Federal Judicial Center’s (FJC) “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence (RMSE)” was inappropriate and careless, since she has subsequently said she hadn’t read the document. The RMSE is biased, giving undo weight to so-called “scientific consensus”over empirical data. At least one of the chapters was written in large part by plaintiffs’ advocates and supporters in ongoing climate litigation, including a case soon to be argued before the Supreme Court. The Blaze’s recommended fixes, rewriting the document to restore neutrality and restoring an emphasis on data and evidence, as well as its suggestion that judges be cautious in relying on such manuals, are on the mark. In addition, Kagan shouldrecuse herself from the pending climate case, since her claimed uninformed endorsement of one side of the argument in advance gives the appearance of impropriety.
The post, written by the CO2 Coalition’s executive director Angela Wheeler, describes how at a recent Senate hearing Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan admitted that she never actually read the FJC manual that she wrote a forward for. Her forward, troublingly, describes the manual as objective and neutral, and suggests that it would be a reliable resource “for judges handling cases involving complex scientific evidence,” including climate related litigation.
Wheeler examined previous editions of the manual, finding them scientifically rigorous. Those earlier editions stressed the need to rely on hard science, data, and the scientific method. By contrast, the recent edition that Kagan signed off on had multiple chapters that placed emphasis on “social considerations and consensus among experts while giving less attention to the rigorous testing that separates science from assertion.”
This is an issue previously raised at Climate Realism and discussed here and here.Climate Change Weekly raised concerns about problems with the RMSE here, here, and here. The fourth edition of the FJC manual originally had an entire chapter devoted to climate change, which alarmingly was penned by activists and climate-plaintiff lawyers who were involved in ongoing climate lawsuits filed against energy companies. Those authors and contributors have clear interests in the science being interpreted their way to produce the outcomes they desire. Objective discussion of climate data had no place in the manual.
Attribution studies claiming that individual weather events could be attributed at least in part to specific emissions are unscientific, based on notably flawed and inadequate computer models that have consistently produced inaccurate forecasts. Climate Realism has discussed the myriad problems with attribution “science” here.
Models, of course, aren’t data, and neither is scientific consensus. Wheeler explains that consensus and collaboration matter and can lead to useful evidence, “[b]ut ‘widespread agreement’ cannot substitute for disciplined scrutiny, especially in court.”
In the case of the so-called “climate consensus,” there is a lot less consensus than activists would have us believe. The actual areas of scientific agreement are much more nuanced. Few scientists believe in anything like a “climate catastrophe,” or that individual storms can be blamed on any particular oil and gas company.
The most egregious chapter of the FJC manual was removed after public outcry, but the consensus narrative and subtle pushes towards activist-driven science remain.
Wheeler suggests that it is not too late for FJC to restore trust. To do so, the manual needs to emphasize data and “empirical verification, seek broader input from experts without policy entanglements, and reaffirm the manual’s limited role as a procedural guide rather than an arbiter of scientific truth.” She goes on to say that manuals like this shouldn’t be used as shortcuts or substitutes for research, but as mere “starting points.”
These steps are likely to help FJC look more trustworthy. However, it is still a problem that Justice Kagan was so negligent in praising a manual she now claims to have not read, especially when it addressed how to interpret science matters pending to a case before the Supreme Court.
With a major climate litigation case coming up in October, it is more important than ever that judges are not tricked into accepting overstated and politicized climate attribution studies, among other theoretical model-based presentations, as evidence. The standard for science, whether inside or outside the courtroom, should never be mere speculation, but solid proof.
President Trump signed an executive order titled ‘Restoring Gold Standard Science’ on May 23rd 2025, aiming to overhaul research-integrity policies and ensure that federal government-sponsored science is “transparent, rigorous and impactful”. The order sparked concern among scientists who fear it could lead to political interference in scientific research and undermine independent scientific inquiry.
President Trump has laid into a new report from the National Academy of Sciences that purports to support ‘extreme weather’ climate litigation. He’s right to do so.
There is a particular kind of institutional decay that announces itself not through incompetence but through overreach – the moment a body built to advise quietly converts itself into an advocacy outfit. That moment arrived in plain view last week when the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a 253-page report claiming that scientists can now attribute individual heatwaves and rainstorms to man-made emissions “with a high degree of confidence”, and wildfires, droughts and cyclones with “moderate confidence”. Two days later, President Trump did something no prior occupant of the White House had quite dared to do: he called the report what it is on Truth Social: “Fraudulent, biased and misleading,” ordering federal suspension and debarment officials to review the Academies’ conduct and taxpayers’ exposure to what he termed “Climate Fraud”.
The howls of outrage were immediate and predictable. But strip away the theatre of a Presidential Truth Social post – capital letters, “Radical Left Dumocrats”, the invented spelling – and what remains is a serious institutional question that deserved to be asked years ago: has the National Academy of Sciences become an advocacy organisation wearing the borrowed authority of ‘consensus science’?
From weights and measures to trial-lawyer auxiliary
Congress chartered the National Academies in 1863 for a modest and useful purpose: advising the government on technical matters such as the calibration of currency and the protection of ship hulls from corrosion. It is worth dwelling on how far the institution has travelled from that brief. As the Wall Street Journal’seditorial board observed in its own broadside against the report, published the same weekend under the pointed headline ‘A Climate Coup at the National Academies of Science’, the new document explicitly frames itself as “relevant to policy and legal decisions pertaining to climate change and liability for losses sustained as a result of extreme weather and climate events”. That is not the language of scientific advice. It is the language of a legal brief.
The report goes further, noting that its methodology could help state and local governments demonstrate the “concrete injury” needed to establish standing in lawsuits against fossil fuel producers, and that it might “inform” measures such as Vermont’s climate superfund law – which empowers state officials to calculate the “financial impact” of greenhouse gas emissions and then demand payment from energy companies to cover it. As the Journal‘s editors put it with admirable bluntness, “the point is to put a scientific gloss on a coercive exercise of government power”. The scientific gloss provides a legal strategy, built to order, for a litigation campaign that has been running for the better part of a decade against the companies that keep the lights on.
None of this should surprise anyone who has followed the emergence of so-called ‘attribution science’ as a distinct field, nor is it the first time House Republicans have raised the alarm: members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology argued that the report presents a conflict of interest precisely because attorneys involved in ongoing climate litigation helped establish the scientific standards the Academies used.
As noted in these pages in an earlier article examining the Naturepaper on “the scientific case for climate liability”, the World Weather Attribution initiative itself has admitted that, unlike any other branch of climate science, “event attribution was originally suggested with the courts in mind”. That is a remarkable thing for a scientific field to concede about its own origins. Most disciplines discover applications for their findings after the fact. Attribution science was conceived, from the outset, as a tool for tort lawyers – the conclusion came first, and the methodology was reverse-engineered to support it.
The conflict-of-interest problem
The most damning detail in the whole affair, and the one that ought to trouble even sympathetic observers of the Academies, concerns Michael Burger, the Executive Director of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law. Burger assisted with the new report and is cited approvingly within it. What the report does not mention is that Burger is also a counsel at Sher Edling LLP, the law firm that has led – and profited handsomely from – the wave of municipal and state lawsuits against ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and the rest of the industry. This is not a minor conflict of interest tucked away in a footnote. It is the central actor in the litigation campaign helping write the scientific document that the litigation campaign will then cite as independent authority.
This is not the first time the pattern has surfaced. The WSJ editorial board reminds readers that a climate chapter written for the Fourth Edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence – a joint publication of the Federal Judicial Centre and the National Academies, distributed to federal judges as guidance on how to weigh expert testimony – drew heavily on Burger’s prior work without proper attribution. That chapter, once the plagiarism and the conflicts came to light, was quietly retracted by the Federal Judicial Centre in February. Electronic copies had already gone out to hundreds of federal judges the previous December and, as one report on the affair noted dryly, could not be recalled. Judges across the country had already been handed a manual instructing them, in effect, on how to receive plaintiff-side attribution evidence – drafted substantially by a plaintiffs’ lawyer.
One retraction might be an embarrassment. A second report, released five months later featuring the same actor and pursuing substantially the same legal agenda, is something closer to an institutional pattern – what David Wojick, writing on Watts Up With That website some years back, described as the Academy’s evolution “from guardians of science to an alarmist fortress”. Institutions rarely announce their capture by groupthink. They simply keep producing the same kind of document, staffed by the same networks, funded by the same interests, until groupthink becomes the institution’s ordinary business.
Follow the funding
It also matters as to who paid for the report. Part of the funding, as the Daily Caller reported, came from the Bezos Earth Fund – the $10 billion philanthropic vehicle established by Amazon’s founder, which has poured money into climate advocacy, activist journalism and litigation-adjacent research since 2020. There is nothing illegal about foundation funding research it favours. But there is something worth noting when a nominally independent scientific academy, chartered by Congress and substantially funded by American taxpayers, produces a document serving the strategic interests of billionaire-funded activist litigation – and does so using the imprimatur of disinterested expertise that taxpayer funding is meant to secure.
The ‘climate liability’ paper published in Nature last year attempted to quantify, down to the dollar, the specific damages attributable to individual oil and gas companies, estimating that Chevron’s emissions alone caused between $791 billion and $3.6 trillion in heat-related losses between 1991 and 2020. That paper was underwritten by the same activist ecosystem: law firms working on contingency, foundations with declared advocacy missions and NGOs as proxy plaintiffs whose stated purpose is ‘legislation through litigation’, bypassing the elected legislatures that would ordinarily set energy and climate policy. The National Academies report simply extends this machinery one further step up the credibility ladder, converting activist economics into what looks, to a busy federal judge without a physics or econometrics background, like ‘consensus science’.
The attribution chain was never solid
The scientific case underlying all of this – the claim that individual weather events, and the economic losses that follow from them, can be attributed with confidence to the historical emissions of a named company – rests on a flimsy chain of inference with at least three weak links.
The first link runs from carbon dioxide emissions to global mean surface temperature, a relationship that depends on climate sensitivity estimates still disputed within the scientific literature itself, with published ranges running from roughly 1.5°C to 4.5°C of warming for a doubling of CO2.
The second link, ‘pattern scaling’, attempts to translate that global average into specific regional and local weather outcomes – a method that imposes a linear, orderly relationship onto a chaotic and non-linear climate system. The IPCC’s own reports as well as independent researchers such as Roger Pielke Jr. have shown how such pattern scaling does a poor job explaining actual trends in hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves once the data are normalised for population growth and economic development.
The third link, translating weather extremes into quantified economic losses, ignores the adaptive capacity of modern economies – air conditioning, flood defences, crop resilience – that has driven a dramatic long-term decline in weather-related mortality, as Bjørn Lomborg has documented at length.
Each of these links is contestable on its own terms. Multiplied together across the ‘end-to-end’ framework that this style of research proposes, the uncertainty compounds rather than cancels. Tort law asks for ‘but-for’ causation: that the harm would not have occurred but for the defendant’s conduct. A model producing damage estimates for a single company spanning a range of several trillion dollars – as the Nature paper did for Chevron – is not evidence of precise causation, but rather of spurious claims dressed up in the mock certainty of numbers and dollar amounts.
There is also a more fundamental omission running through the entire attribution literature, one that the National Academy of Sciences report shares with its predecessors: the studied silence on the benefits of the very gas being prosecuted. Carbon dioxide is not merely an externality to be priced and litigated against; it is, among other things, plant food, and NASA’s own satellite data have documented a substantial global greening effect over recent decades, with researchers finding that CO2 fertilisation explains roughly 70% of the observed increase in global leaf area since 1982, an area equivalent to twice the size of the continental United States. A genuine cost-benefit accounting – of the kind William Nordhaus’s Nobel-winning integrated assessment models are meant to enable – would weigh these benefits against the harms before assigning liability. The attribution literature, by contrast, counts only one side of the ledger. It is advocacy dressed in the vocabulary of science, selectively blind to any finding that would complicate its verdict.
A reckoning worth having
None of this is to say that Trump’s chosen instrument – a suspension and debarment review, more commonly used to bar contractors guilty of fraud or safety violations from further federal work – is obviously the right lever, or that his framing, with its capital letters and conspiratorial flourishes, will do much to persuade anyone not already persuaded. Presidential bombast is a blunt tool, and the more considered critique here belongs to the Journal’s editorial board and to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, whose members raised the underlying conflict-of-interest concerns well before the President reached for his phone. But the underlying complaint is sound, and it would remain sound if it had been delivered in the driest bureaucratic prose imaginable. A body established by Congress to give federal judges disinterested technical guidance has instead handed them a document substantially shaped by the very lawyers profiting from the litigation that the document is meant to inform.
The Soviet Union’s Lysenko episode showed what happens when ideological conformity displaces empirical rigour inside an institution wearing the trappings of science. The National Academy of Sciences exhibits a modern Lysenkoism rife across the climate change debate. American federal judges, weighing genuinely complex scientific questions in courtrooms across dozens of pending climate lawsuits, deserve better than manuals ghost-written, in substance if not in name, by the plaintiffs’ bar. So, for that matter, does the American taxpayer footing part of the bill.
President Trump signed an executive order titled ‘Restoring Gold Standard Science’ on May 23rd 2025, aiming to overhaul research-integrity policies and ensure that federal government-sponsored science is “transparent, rigorous and impactful”. The order sparked concern among scientists who fear it could lead to political interference in scientific research and undermine independent scientific inquiry. In Leftist-progressive circles, it has become fashionable to treat any political scrutiny of a scientific body as an assault on science itself – a framing that conveniently forecloses the harder question of whether the body in question has behaved as a scientific one. The path forward is clear: federal agencies and tax-funded NGOs such as the National Academy of Sciences must adopt rigorous, transparent and falsifiable standards to ensure that science serves truth, not power.
Whatever one makes of President Trump’s chosen words, the underlying demand – that a body claiming the authority of disinterested science should actually be disinterested – is one any serious defender of scientific integrity ought to be able to endorse. Surely the most litigated-against President in US history is right in ensuring that judges overseeing climate litigation in the courts are provided truly objective scientific advice.
Accordingly, then, the bodies were found by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Imperial College London and the Met Office, who claimed to have found more than 2,700 corpses, each with the signature of anthropogenic climate change on them.
It has been quite warm. And on some people’s views, this is a sign of things to come – slightly warmer weather means that Britain is going to be torn from her foundations by the elements that made her. Yet the heatwave, which, after all, as far as most people are concerned, is merely holiday weather, makes for a poor harbinger for that reason. It’s like calling a windfall of cash a sign of looming poverty. So the Green Blob requires a ritual, and therefore that the bodies be found and paraded in front of the press such that fingers can be pointed and Gaia’s wrath invoked against those who dare utter otherwise. Nobody should be allowed to remember the warm days of June and July 2026 fondly.
Accordingly, then, the bodies were found by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Imperial College London and the Met Office, who claimed to have found more than 2,700 corpses, each with the signature of anthropogenic climate change on them. “Using historical mortality records and established peer-reviewed methods,” which “build on previously published research”, these ‘researchers’ found that “550 heat-related deaths occurred in England and Wales during the May heatwave” and “2,200 during the June heatwave”.
According to the press release:
Dr Clair Barnes, Research Associate in Extreme Weather and Climate Change, Imperial College London, said: “It’s time we woke up to the fact that we now live in a country with dangerously hot summers. To protect people during future extremes, we must urgently adapt to the reality of the climate we now have, and double down on global efforts to reach Net Zero emissions to stop this from getting worse.”
And this, my friends, is how we can know for absolute sure that climate change is bullshit, even if it’s real, and even if Britain’s hat-trick of heatwaves in 2026 was caused by it. Because, even if climate change and the heatwaves were real, the deaths were not. As one might expect from the trinity of the LSHTM/Imperial/Met Office, all is not as it seems.
The 2,700 figure is not derived from counting deaths; it comes from statistical attribution models. Researchers combined temperature records with historical relationships between heat and mortality, adjusting for age, geography and long-term trends. The model estimates how many deaths would not have occurred had temperatures remained lower. These are ‘heat-attributable’ deaths rather than directly observed excess deaths.
The Oxford University epidemiologist pair provide us a view of the available data. The May heatwave occurred in weeks 21-22 and the June heatwave in 25-26.
We have been here before. Last year, I reported on how ‘Imperial Predicted Hundreds of Heatwave Deaths – But Deaths Actually Went Down This Summer’. 2025 was also a ‘hot year’, and the news cycle, despite all the real problems the country and world are experiencing, was full of doom-laden climate prognostication from heatwave propaganda. So I had a few discussions with statistician William Briggs about what the data showed. And they showed… practically nothing. “Not only did people not die at greater rates during the horrible heat,” observed Briggs, “they were so bad at science that they declined to die less and less, all through August!”
In fact we’ve been here many times before. Most years bring heatwaves. And these heatwaves bring in their wake bullshit from climate attribution studies along with fake academics peddling stories about thousands of non-existent corpses.
The fake-academic, pseudoscientific enterprise generates endless headlines on its annual cycle. “More than 2,700 people may have died in exceptional May and June heatwaves in England and Wales,” declared the BBC.
All the elements are there for anyone to understand that this phenomenon is propaganda. At the very least, someone with merely the vaguest remnants of self-respect, if not journalistic curiosity, would ask where the 2,700 bodies were and what the actual mode of death was. And despite the lack of an obvious stench from so many corpses, there is the fake academic, remember, urging that “we must urgently adapt to the reality of the climate we now have, and double down on global efforts to reach Net Zero emissions to stop this from getting worse”.
Fortunately, the solution to the scourge of thousands of fake deaths is extremely simple: stop lying. We could close down these manifestly harmful fake academic research organisations, which have been colonised by political ideologies, and the fake deaths would stop instantly. Dr Clair Barns is, as one might expect, housed at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College, which is the beneficiary of more than £30 million in grants from its namesake founder, the Anglo-American hedge fund billionaire Jeremy. Her profile boasts – though the news reports that quote her do not admit – that she is part of “the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative, attributing changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events to climate change”.
Such people are not scientists or statisticians. They are weirdo cultists belonging to a weirdo religious cult, which has somehow manage to colonise Britain’s institutions. From 2,700 imaginary corpses caused by nice weather, these weirdos conjure an argument that requires the dismantling of democratic control of politics and the radical reorganisation of the global economy.
Over in the Guardian, Fiona Harvey weeps, however, that news media coverage of the heatwaves wasn’t alarmist enough, and that some journalists and outlets had failed to properly bow and scrape to the green movement. “Analysis of nearly 2,500 articles finds almost three-quarters made no reference to global heating,” claims the paper’s boringly repetitive “Environment Editor”. The “analysis” was that of the Green Blob-funded and misnamed Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), which, like some kind of Stalinist secret police department, checks each publication’s output for ideological conformity.
It should be noted that Grantham is a European Climate Foundation (ECF) grantor, and that the Guardian, WWA and ECIU are all ECF grantees. In other words, a Green Blob-funded ‘journalist’ in a Green Blob-funded fake newspaper uncritically reproduces a Green Blob-funded front organisation’s claims that real news organisations aren’t sufficiently linking nice weather to ‘climate change’ by ignoring claims about fake deaths detected by Green Blob-funded fake scientists. It is money that keeps the bullshit flowing. It doesn’t matter how many times it is debunked, the bullshitters have vastly more cash and resources available to them than the debunkers.
A massive ‘lawfare’ claim backed by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth has been filed in the UK’s Royal Courts of Justice claiming that Shell Oil played a part in a devastating typhoon in the Philippines in 2021. At the centre of the case is a Green Blob-funded weather ‘attribution’ study that claims Typhoon Rai, also known as Odette, was made significantly worse due to human caused climate change. The study has been recently published and is heavily linked to academic institutions funded by the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham.
A massive ‘lawfare’ claim backed by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth has been filed in the UK’s Royal Courts of Justice claiming that Shell Oil played a part in a devastating typhoon in the Philippines in 2021. At the centre of the case is a Green Blob-funded weather ‘attribution’ study that claims Typhoon Rai, also known as Odette, was made significantly worse due to human caused climate change. The study has been recently published and is heavily linked to academic institutions funded by the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham.
The action has been filed by a number of survivors of the Philippines storm that caused considerable damage in parts of the Philippines in late 2021. It claims financial compensation as well as “injunctive relief to curb Shell’s destructive activities”.
Typhoons are not unknown in this part of the world, but recent evidence suggests there has been little change in the overall trend over the last 100 years. Numbers and intensity of storms rise and fall over shorter periods but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has seen little evidence that humans have recently caused the trend to get worse. In fact, a recent paper published in Nature found “robust declining trends in the annual number of tropical cyclones at global and regional scales during the 20th century”. The paper was titled: ‘Declining tropical cyclone frequency under global warming.’
The key attribution paper in the Shell case uses a standard technique measuring the outputs of two computer model simulations. This imagines an atmosphere where humans have emitted carbon dioxide by burning hydrocarbons and one where there is no such contribution. To say the process is controversial would be an understatement. It cannot count as scientific work under the Popperian principle since the results are unable to be tested and are unfalsifiable. The field of weather attribution is dedicated to grabbing media headlines and providing ammunition for lawfare cases.
If the Shell case ever gets to court, it will be interesting to see how weather attribution claims stand up to forensic cross examination. Shell could call on the services of the distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr., who has noted that he can think of no other area of research “where the relaxing of rigour and standards has been encouraged by research in order to generate claims more friendly to headlines, political advocacy and even lawsuits”. Pielke suggests that the rise of individual event attribution studies coincides with frustration that the IPCC cannot say that the frequency and intensity of most types of extreme weather have increased in an era where humans are using oil and gas. In his view, they offer “comfort and support” to those focused on climate advocacy.
The Typhoon Rai attribution paper is written by four academics from the University of Sheffield and Imperial College London. Both universities have financial links with Jeremy Grantham. The fourth author Nathan Sparks works at the Grantham Institute at Imperial. The Philippines’ Category 5 Cyclone Rai caused widespread damage across the southern-central part of the country, with compounding effects of extreme rainfall, high winds and storm surges. It is claimed that a “multi-method, multi-model probabilistic event attribution” found that wind speeds of landfalling storms like Rai had become 70% more likely due to humans emitting ‘greenhouse’ gases. Looking of course at you in particular Shell Oil. Lawsuits and lawyers thrive on precise numbers so “multi-method probabilistic” modelling along with “compound event attribution theory” produces the conclusion that human-caused climate change “has likely more than doubled the likelihood of a compound event like Typhoon Rai”.
As noted, it will be interesting to see how all this modelling stands up to examination in a civil law court. The less charitable might note that this probabilistic guff would not last five minutes in a criminal court where hard and conclusive evidence, such as DNA, fingerprints, confessions and observations, is generally considered a basic requirement to secure a conviction.
The Rai civil lawsuit has been filed under Philippines tort law in the London Courts due to the domicile of Shell in the UK. The case is backed by three large activist groups who are thought to be covering the legal and organisational costs. Greenpeace is providing advocacy, research and mobilisation support, while Legal Rights and Natural Resources Centre, the local member of Friends of the Earth International, is said to be handling local legal coordination matters. Also involved is a local grouping under the banner of Philippine Movement for Climate Justice. Shell is accused of being responsible for producing 2% of global fossil fuel emissions that have directly contributed to human-caused atmospheric warming. For good measure, Shell is said to have known about the alleged risks for decades, a common claim made by activists that will no doubt be tested in any future court hearing. The mainstream rules around ‘settled’ climate science, where discussion is effectively banned in the interests of promoting the Net Zero fantasy, are unlikely to apply in the London High Court.
The Shell litigation is an important test case. Activists have spent years seeking financial support and recognition for their pseudoscientific claims that they can measure a chaotic and non-linear atmosphere. Such is the level of refinement and expertise that they claim, many people believe they are able to pin the blame for individual weather events on humans. Most mainstream media hype their alchemistic pronouncements without question, but it will be interesting to see how the attribution claims stand up to the attention of m’Learned Friends in a combative court forum.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
Let us travel back to April 2012 and revisit an important milestone in BBC climate reporting – what is thought to be the last recorded sighting of genuine journalistic inquiry. Richard Knight noted an extremist claim that up to 150 mostly animal species are lost every day, but then went on to observe that if the claim was really true, should we not expect the International Union for Conservation in Nature to list more than 801 extinct species in the last 512 years. Fast forward 10 years and Esme Stallard was honking without any alternative view that “the extinction of species is now happening between 1,000 and 10,000 times quicker than scientists would expect to see”.
Let us travel back to April 2012 and revisit an important milestone in BBC climate reporting – what is thought to be the last recorded sighting of genuine journalistic inquiry. Richard Knight noted an extremist claim that up to 150 mostly animal species are lost every day but then went on to observe that if the claim was really true, should we not expect the International Union for Conservation in Nature to list more than 801 extinct species in the last 512 years. Fast forward 10 years and Esme Stallard was honking without any alternative view that “the extinction of species is now happening between 1,000 and 10,000 times quicker than scientists would expect to see”. Humans could be causing the “sixth mass extinction”, scientists are said to have warned. Over the last two decades, climate science reporting at the BBC has been reduced to cherry-picking the worst ‘scientists say’ clickbait remarks to promote the hard-Left Net Zero fantasy. Debate has been abolished, the scientific inquiry process trashed, and the intelligence of the British public insulted on a daily basis. It’s almost as if the BBC decided to convince everyone that a woman can have a penis.
In the wake of the BBC’s decision to mark its own homework by referring climate change reporting to its Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, we would do well to acknowledge the sheer enormity of the crime against investigative journalism that has been perpetrated for over two decades. It is an appalling story of journalists kowtowing to a prevailing narrative. They have been willing and able to take a central role in inducing a mass climate psychosis in the general public that has been designed for purely political purposes.
The BBC climate conspiracy – what other word is appropriate? – can be traced back 25 years to the activities of the then climate chief Roger Harrabin. In 2006 he led a secret editorial meeting, heavily weighted with activists, that attempted to redefine the editorial balance between competing climate change opinions. Natural forces were to be downplayed in favour of the unproven suggestion that any current global warming was mostly caused by humans burning hydrocarbons. At the time, the BBC tried to keep the science wrecking-ball meeting secret, but a few years later details were leaked showing that most of the delegates were highly supportive of the green agenda. Such was the editorial power of Harrabin and his ilk, sceptical and alternative views on climate change started to be removed from BBC content. In 2018, the then director of news and current affairs Fran Unsworth determined that sceptics were no longer to be invited regularly, an effective ban on discussing the scientific process that remains in force to this day.
Few activist endeavours fail the Popperian ‘falsification’ science test more than the attribution of single weather events to human causes. Computer models are used to almost instantly attribute a single bad weather event to the burning of hydrocarbons, a tactic that plays into the promotion of Net Zero. The results are worthless guesses, not least because it is impossible to ‘model’ the chaotic and non-linear atmosphere. The long-time science writer Roger Pielke takes a similar view: “I can think of no other area of research where the relaxing of rigour and standards has been encouraged by researchers in order to generate claims more friendly to headlines, political advocacy and even lawsuits.” Needless to say, attribution studies and their ‘garbage in, garbage out’ results are a mainstay in BBC climate reporting.
Countless BBC reports state that extreme weather is getting worse. Across the network, Attenborough, with over 70 years’ experience in sniffing the direction of the BBC wind, and Packham, along with their many disciples, have been allowed to scream ‘FIRE!’ in the theatre of climate absurdities across all channels. This type of continuous gaslighting even persuaded the Prince of Wales to get in on the act last week at COP30. Point of information for the Pontificating Prince: Arctic Sea ice extent has been stable since 2005 – even the Guardiannow admits that. Mere data tell a different story on extreme weather, with the IPCC admitting that most types have shown no recent discernible increase. Meanwhile, hydrocarbon-produced wealth has led to a reduction of 99% in the number of fatalities around the world due to bad weather events over the last century. Climate ‘refugees’ are not a problem, not least because nobody can actually define what they are. Meanwhile, global ‘greening’, helped by a little extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is helping to feed the world.
Little if any of this is reflected in BBC coverage. Instead the former editor of Radio 4 flagship Today, Sarah Sands, laments how the British politician Nigel Lawson managed to slip the guard in a BBC studio and observe the lack of increasing extreme weather. Writing in an attribution guide for journalists published by the World Weather Attribution operation, she said she wished she had such a service to effectively challenge his claims. These days, she enthused, attribution studies have given us significant insight into the horsemen of the climate apocalypse. “We have evidence and we have facts. They are a secure foundation for news,” she claimed. The less kind might ask if some people at the BBC know what facts, evidence and news actually are.
These days it is common for companies to hand out ‘Journalist of the Year’ awards featuring their name and trade to specialist writers. It is not something independent journalists should even consider, but the bung of a couple of grand and bragging rights (once the corporate name and trade is omitted) is a minor if silly offence against editorial independence. Younger, naïve journalists might think it looks good on the CV. But raise the award to, say, €100,000 and more serious questions can be raised. Should journalists take such enormous sums of cash from people they might write about, whatever way it is given? The BBC’s Matt McGrath had no problems with this since he accepted a 2019 award from the philanthropic foundation of the Spanish bank BBVA for his “rigorous and assessable coverage of environmental issues”. BBVA is heavily involved in green financing and has since made €100,000 payments to the Guardian (what a surprise) and Marlowe Hood of Agence France-Presse who describes himself as the “Herald of the Anthropocene”.
How the dots join up in the best alarmist circles. In 2022, four Italian scientists led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti published a paper in Nature that said there was not a climate crisis and there was little evidence that extreme weather was getting worse. All hell broke out when the paper went viral on social media and a group led by a Guardian writer, Marlowe Hood, and World Weather Attribution Head Dr Frederike Otto banded together to get it retracted. They succeeded, with Otto, a regular commentator on attribution for the BBC, claiming the paper had not been written in “good faith”. Hood was even more forthright, sneering:” It may be akin to removing a speck of dust from a rubbish heap, but I confess to taking satisfaction in seeing this egregiously bad climate study retracted.” For his part, Pielke observed that the retraction was one of the “most egregious failures of scientific publishing that I have seen”.
For the last 25 years, the reporting of climate science at the BBC has been a joke. This is particularly unfortunate for those who own a television receiver. They might have no wish to consume the BBC’s skewed output on climate and many other issues, but they are often forced to pay a regressive annual tax of £174.50 to the state corporation. The ghastly enforcement of a strict ‘settled’ climate policy has led to the publication and broadcast of countless one-sided articles and programmes. Many of them have been effectively debunked, shown to be the clickbait scary nonsense they are. The Daily Sceptic and its contributors have done their share of the heavy lifting, but the big shout out must go to the indefatigable Paul Homewood who for many years has been a constant thorn in the once armour-plated hide of the BBC. A number of his official complaints to the BBC were noted in a Telegraph article reporting on the BBC inquiry.
The BBC is not alone in its fantasy reporting. Most mainstream media have been happy to print poppycock climate propaganda in the interest of keeping the elite Net Zero narrative going. The eminent MIT Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen says the current climate narrative is “absurd”, but trillions of dollars says it is not “absurd”. But Net Zero is starting to collapse around the world, leaving fading outlier countries like the de-industrialising UK and Germany as the canaries in the emptying mine. Trump’s America is resuming normal industrial progress, so there is less need for a chirping mainstream media chorus of climate catastrophe. The incorrectly-named climate science department at the BBC does not need to be reformed, it just needs to be shut down.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
The New York Times (NYT) published an article titled “How Climate Change Affects Hurricanes Like Erin,” in which they rely on rapid attribution analysis to claim that climate change is making rapidly intensifying hurricanes more likely, implying that the storm was worsened by global warming. This is false. Attribution studies are generally not based on solid scientific evidence and therefore not provable. Plus, evidence is lacking to support the idea that rapid intensification is actually becoming more common.
The New York Times (NYT) published an article titled “How Climate Change Affects Hurricanes Like Erin,” in which they rely on rapid attribution analysis to claim that climate change is making rapidly intensifying hurricanes more likely, implying that the storm was worsened by global warming. This is false. Attribution studies are generally not based on solid scientific evidence and therefore not provable. Plus, evidence is lacking to support the idea that rapid intensification is actually becoming more common.
At the outset, the NYT claimed that hurricane Erin’s effects, such that they are, “are made worse by global warming,” even though the storm stayed offshore. The storm intensified quickly from a Category 1 to a Category 5 hurricane, and NYT claims that “[a]s the planet warms, scientists say that rapidly intensifying hurricanes are becoming ever more likely.”
First, it is important to note that just because a storm is among the most rapidly intensifying on record, does not mean there were not similar storms that failed to be recorded. As mentioned in a previous Climate Realism post about hurricane Erin, hurricane measurement technology is far advanced today from where it was even a few decades ago. Before widespread use of Hurricane Hunter flights starting in the 70s where offshore storms were first closely monitored and directly measured throughout their lifespan, other rapidly intensifying storms would not have made the record. So, there is uncertainty of the record there.
Beyond that, attribution researchers and NYT would like to blame hurricane intensification all on warm surface water temperatures, but rapid intensification occurs in response to a variety of factors lining up just right. Similar claims were made two years ago concerning hurricane Otis. That storm also intensified rapidly over a single day, turning into a Category 5 before hutting the west coast of Mexico. Otis did not intensify under expected conditions, thunderstorm bursts that forecasters were unable to predict are now believed to have been responsible for its rapid intensification.
Just as some scientists say more intense storms are more likely with warming, other scientists say that they will become less likely to form, or less likely to strike land. The NYT neglected to mention these perspectives, focusing its story on the scarier opinions that support the narrative that climate change is responsible for worsening extreme weather events.
In fact, as Climate at A Glance: Hurricanes details, there is no data suggesting hurricanes are becoming more frequent or more intense.
The NYT cites an event attribution group, Climate Central (CC), as the main source of its claim that climate change is the reason hurricanes are intensifying more rapidly, writing that CC did an analysis which found that “human-caused climate change made the warm water temperature around where Erin formed at least 90 times more likely.”
As Climate Realism has addressed previously concerning claims that climate change was responsible for various extreme weather events, attribution studies are not proof or even evidence. They are suffer from the fatal logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. The scholars assume from the outset that climate change played a role in the events and then run counterfactual models consisting of a modeled world without human carbon dioxide emissions, and compare its results, not with the real world, but with model outputs of a world with human greenhouse gas emissions. The analysts then assume the difference between the two sets of model runs is the result of human activities, and accurately reflect the real world. The problem is, neither the counterfactual world nor the “rising greenhouse gas world” accurately portray the nuances of the real world. We simply don’t understand all the conditions that drive climate change, much less individual extreme weather events — its the assumptions built into the models that drive the results, and those assumptions reflect the biases of the authors that human activities are driving climate change. The mainstream media often treats these attribution outcomes as if they results were verified through independent testing and/or reflected measured data, when neither is the case.
The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that it is “premature to conclude with high confidence that human-caused increases in greenhouse gases have caused a change in past Atlantic basin hurricane activity that is outside the range of natural variability,” based on measured data. Though they do say that Atlantic hurricane activity seems to have increased since 1980, that trend isn’t representative of a longer-term trend once older data is assessed. They explain “[s]ubstantial multidecadal variability in the Atlantic basin confounds efforts to detect long-term greenhouse gas-induced trends.”
Single event attribution studies tend to be, as described by climate scientist Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. when discussing attribution modeling for Hurricane Dorian, “sensitivity analysis of an actual storm” to “prescribed” conditions in another model. Pielke says it’s interesting modelling, but “it can say nothing about the cause of Dorian or its intensity.”
The same is true of Erin. The modelers assume that human-caused global warming influenced the rapid intensification of the storm; build a model with conditions that would reflect that, then compared it to an approximate model of the real storm in question. This is not evidence, it is confirmation bias.
There are a lot of predictions and model projections out there with various end results for hurricane formation under different scenarios, but none of them are substitutes for observed data. The NYT is not alone when it comes to leaning heavily on single-event attribution peddlers like Climate Central, but certainly should be criticized and called out when they do so. In this case, the article contained both scientific and journalistic malpractice.
According to Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 170 Londoners died due to climate change in last week’s heatwave. But it’s just more modelling make believe, says Ross Clark in the Spectator.
According to Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 170 Londoners died due to climate change in last week’s heatwave. But it’s just more modelling make believe, says Ross Clark in the Spectator. Here’s an excerpt.
So, 260 Londoners died as a result of last week’s heatwave, of which 170 can be attributed to climate change. So claims Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
There’s just the one problem with this: the researchers haven’t actually counted any deaths at all. The study rushed out this week is nothing more than a piece of modelling, which estimates the number of deaths which might be expected to have been caused by the hot weather, as well as trying to guess how much hotter last week’s weather was than it would have been without man-made climate change. We won’t know whether there really were any excess deaths during the hot weather until the Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes its figures in a few weeks’ time.
Why rush out a piece of modelling when we will shortly have some real-world data? The researchers will have to explain their reasoning, but it is as well to note that both the participants in this study have a bit of previous when it comes to modelling alarming numbers of deaths.
Both were heavily involved in modelling during the Covid pandemic. Many of their predictions were not able to be tested against real data: we will never know, for example, whether 500,000 people really would have died of Covid were it not for social distancing measures – as Imperial College claimed in its paper of March 16th 2020 – because, of course, the government did impose a lockdown.
But towards the end of the crisis, one prediction was able to be tested against reality. On December 11th 2021, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine put out a paper claiming that 24,000 people would die as a result of the Omicron variant of Covid, with daily hospitalisations peaking above those in January 2021, unless the government introduced a return to lockdown -style measures. Perhaps it was counting on ministers taking its advice, but in the event the cabinet resisted – and the prediction was exposed for what it was: a gross exaggeration.
Editor’s Note: Master Resource’s founder and editor, Rob Bradley, is currently struggling with the aftermath of torrential flooding in the Texas Hill Country. Until he can return to work, he has asked me to post “classic” MR entries. Yesterday, he called in to suggest the following blog post would be a suitable classic. It ran initially at MR on March 11, 2021. —Roger Donway, Managing Editor
By way of introduction, Rob writes: “To critics, NOAA not only provides information, but misinformation based on climate models and attribution studies. The post below provides the example of NOAA’s prediction leading into the Texas Winter of 2020–2021.”
“NOAA’s timely and accurate seasonal outlooks and short-term forecasts are the result of improved satellite observations, more detailed computer forecast modeling, and expanding supercomputing capacity,” said Neil Jacobs, Ph.D., acting NOAA administrator. (below)
“Cold extremes decrease and warm extremes increase in a warmer world, and cold extremes tend to be more sensitive to global warming than the warm ones.” (emphasis added) Science Bulletin, below
Humility in the face of unknowns is a worthy attribute. And when it comes to the Earth’s climate, in the whole and regionally, a prediction can be worse than no prediction.
Enter climate models, the Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and politics. And a very bad result for the South this winter. The lack of weatherization in Texas for traditional power plants, in particular, might well have been influenced by the climate narrative of warmer winters.
NOAA Misfire
The October 15, 2020, Press Release from NOAA speaks for itself.
NOAA’s winter forecast for the U.S. favors warmer, drier conditions across the southern tier of the U.S., and cooler, wetter conditions in the North, thanks in part to an ongoing La Nina. Forecasters at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center — a division of the National Weather Service — are also closely monitoring persistent drought during the winter months ahead, with more than 45% of the continental U.S. now experiencing drought.
“NOAA’s timely and accurate seasonal outlooks and short-term forecasts are the result of improved satellite observations, more detailed computer forecast modeling, and expanding supercomputing capacity,” said Neil Jacobs, Ph.D., acting NOAA administrator. “From expansive and multi-hazard winter storms to narrow but intense lake effect snow, NOAA will provide the necessary information to keep communities safe.”
Currently, large areas of drought extend over the western half of the U.S., with parts of the Northeast also experiencing drought and near-record low stream flows. With a La Nina climate pattern in place, southern parts of the U.S. may experience expanded and intensifying drought during the winter months ahead.
“With La Nina well established and expected to persist through the upcoming 2020 winter season, we anticipate the typical, cooler, wetter North, and warmer, drier South, as the most likely outcome of winter weather that the U.S. will experience this year,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.
Temperature
The greatest chances for warmer-than-normal conditions extend across the Southern tier of the U.S. from the Southwest, across the Gulf states and into the Southeast. More modest probabilities for warmer temperatures are forecast in the southern parts of the west coast, and from the Mid-Atlantic into the Northeast. Above-average temperatures are also favored for Hawaii and western and northern Alaska.
Below-normal temperatures are favored in southern Alaska and from the northern Pacific Northwest into the Northern Plains, with equal chances for below-, near- or above-average temperatures in the remaining regions….
About NOAA’s seasonal outlooks
NOAA’s seasonal outlooks provide the likelihood that temperatures and total precipitation amounts will be above-, near- or below-average, and how drought conditions are favored to change. The outlook does not project seasonal snowfall accumulations; snow forecasts are generally not predictable more than a week in advance.
Seasonal outlooks help communities prepare for what is likely to come in the months ahead and minimize weather’s impacts on lives and livelihoods. Empowering people with actionable forecasts and winter weather safety tips is key to NOAA’s effort to build a more Weather-Ready Nation.
Climate Model Misfires
Data-hound Bjorn Lomborg recently exposed the “global weirding” argument that the human influence produces the opposite of global warming.
CBS [Ben Tracy] & Kerry say “Many people wrongly believe that climate change only relates to temperatures increasing, not decreasing.” But the reality is that *all* climate models show less frost, fewer cold days, fewer cold nights.
Based on the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) daily dataset, we investigate changes of the terrestrial extreme climates given that the global mean temperature increases persistently under the Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 (RCP8.5) scenario.
Compared to preindustrial conditions, more statistically significant extreme temperatures, precipitations, and dry spells are expected in the 21st century. Cold extremes decrease and warm extremes increase in a warmer world, and cold extremes tend to be more sensitive to global warming than the warm ones.
When the global mean temperature increases, cold nights, cold days, and warm nights all display nonlinear relationships with it, such as the weakening of the link projected after 3 °C global warming, while the other indices generally exhibit differently, with linear relationships.
“Global Weirding” to the Rescue
In trying to square the record cold with global warming, CBS & Kerry (above) settled on the term “global weirding.”
Ben Tracy, senior national and environmental correspondent for CBS, asked guest John Kerry about the recent cold snap:
Some people get hung up on the term “global warming” and say, “well, I thought everything’s supposed to get warmer?” I heard one scientist say this is really “global weirding.” Is that a better way to think of this?
I think it’s a very appropriate way to think of it. It’s directly related to the warming even though your instinct is to say, “wait a minute. This is the new ice age.” But it’s not. It is coming from the global warming and it threatens all the normal weather patterns.
Where did the catch-all “global weirding” come from? Thomas Friedman might have popularized it in the New York Times eleven years ago:
Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.
The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.
Conclusion
If climate change causes everything, it causes nothing.
Global weirding is the (central planning, one-world-government) emperor’s new clothes. If that term were not politically correct, or if a fossil fuel company pulled out the explanation for a financial or operational failure, it would be laughed out of the park.
The drumbeat of climate litigation has grown louder in recent years, fuelled by activists and dubious science. In this crusade against major oil and gas companies, ‘attribution science’ has been a fast-growing field of climate research which is explicitly meant to serve legal ends. According to the World Weather Attribution initiative, “Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was originally suggested with the courts in mind.”
The drumbeat of climate litigation has grown louder in recent years, fuelled by activists and dubious science. In this crusade against major oil and gas companies, ‘attribution science’ has been a fast-growing field of climate research which is explicitly meant to serve legal ends. According to the World Weather Attribution initiative, “Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was originally suggested with the courts in mind.”
According to ‘Carbon Majors and the Scientific Case for Climate Liability‘, a paper published in Nature last month, it is now possible to quantify the climate damages caused by each of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies. Christopher Callahan and Justin Mankin, co-authors of the peer-reviewed paper, argue that “the scientific case for climate liability is closed”. In their paper, they claim to link oil and gas companies’ CO2 emissions to specific weather events and trillions in economic damages.
This audacious attempt to pin tort liability on oil and gas giants like Saudi Aramco and ExxonMobil rests on shaky economic and scientific grounds and ignores the immense benefits of fossil fuels.
Given the high stakes in the litigious turn of climate change alarmists, this paper’s assertions, flawed assumptions and the embedded activist machinery deserve a thorough debunking
The ‘Carbon Majors’ Paper: A Blueprint for Climate Litigation
The central assertion of Callahan and Jenkin is that advancements in climate attribution science enable courts to hold fossil fuel companies liable for damages caused by global warming. The authors propose an “end-to-end” attribution framework that links emissions from major oil and gas firms to specific extreme weather events — such as heatwaves, floods and droughts — and quantifies resulting economic losses. Using “scope 1” (direct emissions from producing oil and gas) and “scope 3” (consumer emissions from combustion of fuels) data, peer-reviewed climate models (e.g. CMIP6) and econometric methods, the paper estimates, for instance, that Chevron’s emissions from 1991 to 2020 caused $791 billion to $3.6 trillion in heat-related losses.
The framework relies on three key steps:
Attribution of CO2 to Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST): The authors use models to estimate how companies’ emissions contribute to global warming.
Pattern Scaling for Local Weather: They apply “pattern scaling” methods to translate GMST increases into regional temperature extremes, such as the hottest five-day period (Tx5d).
Empirical Damage Functions: Econometric models estimate economic losses (e.g. income declines, agricultural losses) from these extremes, drawing on regional GDP per capita data.
The paper positions this framework as a legal game-changer for climate liability. It cites ongoing lawsuits such as an Oregon county’s claim against oil companies for the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave. The paper advocates its “end-to-end attribution framework” to align with the many activist lawsuits targeting major energy producers. The authors argue that tort law, akin to tobacco litigation, can hold companies accountable for “particularised harms”, offering a transparent, reproducible method for courts to assess liability.
A Flawed Economic Case: Unravelling the Assumptions
The paper’s assertions rest on three contested causal chains — CO2 to global mean surface temperature (GMST), GMST to extreme local weather events, and extreme weather events to human welfare — each riddled with uncertainty. Meanwhile, it dismisses the greening effects of CO2 and the foundational role of fossil fuels in modern civilisation, skewing the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) central to sound economic policy.
The paper assumes a direct link between CO2 emissions and GMST, but this relationship is far from settled. Climate sensitivity — how much warming results from a doubling of CO2 and other greenhouse gases of which water vapour is the most significant — remains a subject of unresolved scientific debate. Estimates range from 1.5°C to 4.5°C, with some studies, like those by Nic Lewis and Judith Curry, suggesting lower sensitivities based on observational data rather than computer model simulations.
The paper’s reliance on CMIP6 models, which often overestimate historical warming, introduces significant uncertainty. Natural factors, such as solar variability, celestial orbits and volcanic activity, further muddy the attribution of GMST changes to CO2 or greenhouse gases alone. By treating CO2 as the sole driver of warming, the authors overstate the causal role of fossil fuel companies, ignoring the complex, multivariate nature of climate dynamics. This oversimplification inflates economic damage estimates and misguides courts into assigning liability based on unproven premises.
Even the very concept of a global mean temperature is subject to much qualification as an actual measure. It is often wrongly treated as a kind of single, direct instrumental measurement when it is really the average of widely scattered station data. As Richard S. Lindzen and John R. Christy suggest, at least thus far, “the one-degree Celsius increase in the global mean since 1900 is swamped by the normal variations at individual stations, and so bears little relation to what is actually going on at a particular one”.
The paper’s use of “pattern scaling” to relate GMST to local weather extremes is even more problematic. Pattern scaling assumes a linear relationship between global temperature increases and regional weather patterns, but this method oversimplifies the chaotic and non-linear nature of climate systems. Local weather events are influenced by regional factors that global models struggle to capture. Studies by the IPCC and Roger Pielke Jr, for instance, highlight that extreme weather trends (e.g. hurricanes, heatwaves) show no consistent increase attributable to climate change when normalised for population and economic growth.
The paper’s wide damage ranges ($791 billion to $3,600 billion for Chevron) reflect this uncertainty, yet it presents these figures as actionable for litigation. From an economic perspective, such speculative estimates fail to meet the precision required for tort law’s ‘but-for’ causation (which would show that the plaintiff would not have suffered damages but for the actions of the defendant). This renders the attribution of specific events to individual companies a legal and scientific fantasy.
The final link — local weather extremes to human welfare — is just as weak. The paper’s econometric models estimate losses like income declines or crop failures, but these rely on speculative counterfactuals and data-scarce regions. The law and economics literature, exemplified by Richard Posner’s seminal work, demands that damages be quantifiable and directly attributable, yet the paper’s estimates are probabilistic and diffuse.
Moreover, the paper ignores societal adaptation measures — improved infrastructure, air conditioning, crop resilience — that mitigate weather impacts. Economically, these models overstate costs by neglecting the dynamic adaptability that has historically reduced weather-related mortality and economic losses, as documented most consistently by Bjorn Lomborg. It is indeed perverse to argue for constraints on the supply of fossil fuels when it is their very accessibility that allows humans to adapt to adverse weather events. Building shore and flood protection structures, drainage and irrigation infrastructure and sturdier housing — should they be necessary – need cheap energy.
The Greening Effect of CO2: A Net Benefit Ignored
Perhaps the most glaring omission is the paper’s failure to acknowledge the positive effects of CO2. Far from being a pollutant, the trace gas CO2 is a ‘plant fertiliser’ required for photosynthesis, driving global greening and agricultural productivity. NASA satellite data show a 14% increase in global leaf area from 1982 to 2015, largely due to CO2 fertilisation, boosting crop yields by 15-30% for staples like wheat and rice. Studies by Craig Idso and the CO2 Coalition suggest that CO2’s benefits — enhanced food security, reduced hunger — outweigh its costs, particularly in relatively arid developing nations. Proper cost-benefit analysis of climate-economy models, as advocated by economics Noble laureate William Nordhaus, weigh these benefits against alleged harms. By omitting CO2’s positive externalities, the paper distorts the net economic impact of fossil fuel emissions, undermining its liability claims.
In their failure to include the direct benefits of fossil fuels to willing buyers, the authors of ‘Carbon Majors’ betray the egregious nature of their intent in engaging in tactical ‘attribution science’. In their dismissal of fossil fuels’ role in underpinning modern civilisation, their advocacy against oil and gas companies also reveals their profound lack of concern for human flourishing.
Since the Industrial Revolution, oil, gas, and coal have powered economic growth, lifting billions out of poverty. Global real GDP per capita soared from $1,500 in 1820 to over $10,000 by 2020, driven by fossil fuel-enabled urbanisation and industrialisation. In 2023, these fuels met over 80% of global energy needs, providing heating, cooling, cooking, mobility and fertilisers critical for agriculture. The ‘four pillars of modern civilisation‘ – ammonia (for fertilisers), cement, steel and plastics — require ready access to cheap fossil fuels. The petrochemical industry, reliant on oil, produces plastics, pharmaceuticals and materials essential to modern life.
The ‘Carbon Majors’ paper is not a neutral academic exercise but a cog in a climate-activist machine. The paper’s trillion-dollar damage claims against oil and gas companies ignore the benefits they confer on willing buyers. If successful in proposing liability against fossil fuel companies, climate litigation will raise energy costs, harm consumers and stifle development.
The economic consequences of the paper’s liability framework are dire. Holding companies liable for historical and lawful emissions risks bankrupting key industries, raising energy prices and disrupting supply chains. Low-income households and developing nations, reliant on affordable energy, would bear the brunt, but everyone will be affected. The paper’s retrospective approach violates fairness, as fossil fuel use is a collective societal choice in free market economies, not a corporate conspiracy. Litigation diverts resources from innovation and adaptation — better infrastructure, resilient crops — to legal battles that enrich activist firms.
A Call for Economic and Scientific Integrity
The climate lawsuits that Callahan and Mankin support are driven by firms like Sher Edling LLP and funded by billionaire foundations such as the Rockefeller Family Fund. These groups, alongside NGOs like ExxonKnew, pursue ‘legislation through litigation’, bypassing democratic processes. The US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has raised concerns about USAID funding activist environmental NGOs.
The US Justice Department filed lawsuits against four states last week, claiming their climate actions conflict with federal authority and President Donald Trump’s energy dominance agenda. On April 30th, the DOJ filed lawsuits against Hawaii and Michigan over their plans for legal action against fossil fuel companies for harms caused by climate change. A day later, the department sued New York and Vermont, challenging their climate superfund laws that would force fossil fuel companies to pay into state-based funds based on previous greenhouse gas emissions.
This activist-driven approach distorts any fair consideration of cost-benefit trade-offs by prioritising ideological goals — demonising fossil fuels — over objective analysis. Contingency fees and foundation grants for law firms incentivise exaggerated claims, inflating damages while ignoring benefits, contrary to tort law’s compensatory purpose. The paper’s silence on these influences betrays its complicity in this agenda, undermining its credibility.
The ‘Carbon Majors’ authors’ attempt to pin climate liability on fossil fuel companies is an economic and scientific folly. Its causal chains — CO2 to global temperature (GMST), GMST to local weather, local weather to welfare — are fraught with uncertainty and fails to meet tort law’s rigour. Its economic reasoning collapses under scrutiny, built on a house of cards with dubious scientific assertions and activist bias.
By ignoring CO2’s greening benefits and fossil fuels’ foundational role in modern civilisation and by presenting a one-sided case against oil and gas companies for trillion-dollar damages, the paper skews any reasonable assessment of trade-offs facing society. Policymakers should reject this spurious crusade and embrace market-based solutions that balance costs, benefits and the undeniable contributions of fossil fuels to human progress.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
Few fearmongering scares cause more deliberate panic than sudden and overwhelming flooding. The ancients were at it in the Bible and the Net Zero fanatics use it to drive modern-day mass climate psychosis. Fake pseudoscience attributions of heavy human involvement are fed to activist journalists who promote the invented idea that there is a ‘climate emergency’.
Few fearmongering scares cause more deliberate panic than sudden and overwhelming flooding. The ancients were at it in the Bible and the Net Zero fanatics use it to drive modern-day mass climate psychosis. Fake pseudoscience attributions of heavy human involvement are fed to activist journalists who promote the invented idea that there is a ‘climate emergency’. But a recent scientific paper has blown all this Noah-inspired nonsense out of the water. Studying both documentary and geological flooding records, a group of European scientists found that over multi-century and millennial periods across parts of western and southwestern Europe, floods have been of a much higher magnitude than those of the present day. In the UK, flooding in the Severn area during the last 70 years “was not considered exceptional” in the context of the 4,000-year record.
The science team, including Professor Mark Macklin of the University of Lincoln, showed that flood magnitude was “significantly higher” before the 20th century, despite there being a negligible greenhouse gas contribution from humans. In a phrase that strikes down much of the pseudoscientific weather-attribution copy, it is noted that this means “natural variability might be significantly higher than assumed by climate modellers”.
The scientists state clearly that any attempt to attribute anthropogenic causes to extreme events such as droughts and flooding needs a sufficient length of events to enable comparisons to be drawn. Attempts using computer models to attribute recent floods to human causes have been made, the authors note, but such assessments “have failed to correctly analyse the true frequency and magnitude of past floods, when anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing was low”. It becomes clearer by the day why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pointed out in its latest assessment report that human involvement in almost all extreme weather categories is almost impossible to discern. In fact this inconvenient conclusion has directly led to the major growth of modelled attributions. Activists have become increasingly frustrated by the IPCC and pressed ahead with their pseudoscience due to the the need for lawfare material and ‘trusted media’ scare stories.
The scientists go on to point out that their findings have “profound implications” for flood planning and climate adaptation policy, “as many recent floods cannot be viewed as unprecedented, even in the historical record”. Alas, any changes in public policy over Europe at least will have to wait for the pre-ordained narrative to be re-written, so there might be a bit of a wait.
The scientists looked in detail at the Lower Rhine in Germany, the upper Severn in the UK and the Valencian community rivers in Spain.
The above illustration shows clearly that the largest flooding during the past 8,000 years in the Lower Rhine did not occur in the recent past. Far from it, with at least 12 floods, including massive inundation in 1374, likely to have exceeded the highest modern peak discharges.
Recent floods in the Severn area are frequently used by Net Zero activists to whip up climate fear. The illustration below would appear to show that such stories are little more than the product of those possessed of over-stimulated imaginations. Nothing out of the ordinary is to be found, and it appears we are in a current period of reduced inundation.
Late last year Jonathan Watts of the Guardian said that the recent “apocalyptic” Spanish floods in Valencia showed two undeniable truths – “the climate crisis is getting worse and Big Oil is killing us”. Getting into his hysterical Guardianista stride, Watts continued to amplify his message: “The unnatural disaster in Spain – Europe’s deadliest flash floods in at least half a century – is evidence of two undeniable truths: the human-caused climate crisis is just starting to pick up ferocity and we need to quickly kill the fossil fuel industry before it kills us.” How we laughed first time around – Jim ‘jail the deniers’ Dale come back, all is forgiven – only to be set off again in our mirth by consideration of the actual evidence of floods in the area going back to 1400.
If we consider the Spanish area including Valencia we can see Guardian-style apocalypse floods throughout the record going back to 1400. This was no doubt very useful to promote whatever scares the sandwich board loons were peddling at the time. In fact the largest flows of the 18th and 19th centuries had peaks about 25% higher than those of the present.
Every day is undeniably Apocalypse Day at the Net Zero-crazed Guardian. Or should that be April Fools’ Day.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’sEnvironment Editor.
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