Bad Storms, Bad Science

In which the conclusion is foregone

Yesterday morning I woke up and checked email on my phone. Right away, I was dooming myself. I know this. My phone spends the night in a different room from me, but it still acts as my alarm. All of my alarms are frog calls or bird songs; all my ring tones, too. They are not harsh or lab-created. Sometimes when frogs actually call I look around and wonder if my alarm is going off. Still. The frogs went off and I woke from a deep sleep and got up to silence them, looked at the time, and recognized that I had both given myself a long enough time to sleep and also not forced myself to have to rush as soon as the alarm went off. Then I made my first error of the day. I took the phone back to bed with me, and checked my email.

My virtual life is fairly clean, while not being nearly as clean as it might be. I say yes to receiving newsletters and tables of contents from a great many publications, ranging from scientific journals to substacks to legacy media outlets. I read to appeal to my own interests, and also to see what people wholly different from me are reading. I sign up for updates, even pay for subscriptions, from publications about which I know little. It is good to see what is out there.

Forbes is one such publication. I know it only as a business magazine, one which offers commentary and advice on finance and investment, and publishes lists of rich people.

It also puts out newsletters that are highly specific, one of which I received in my inbox yesterday morning. Forbes: Current Climate. The blurb about this newsletter—the pitch that you see when deciding whether to toggle it into or out of your inbox, is this:

Forbes: Current Climate: Get a temperature check on the environment and sustainability.

Cute. Not clever, exactly, but cute. Maybe. Except that they’ve tipped their hand, haven’t they. They already have a conclusion, hidden in word play. Also, “environment” is understood to be a subset of climate in this framing. I object. The environment is so much more. I am an environmentalist. And I am deeply skeptical of much of what is passing for climate science.

This week’s “Current Climate” newsletter began with these two paragraphs:

Hurricane Milton hit Florida hard earlier this month. Without climate change, it wouldn’t have been as bad, according to scientific researchers.

Hurricane Milton was wetter, windier and more destructive because of climate change, according to a study by the international scientific group World Weather Attribution. The group figures that without climate change Milton would have been a Category 2 storm rather than a Category 3 hurricane when it made landfall. Perhaps more worrisome, the researchers found that storms with Milton’s wind speeds have become 40% more frequent because the climate has warmed by 1.3 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times.

Those deadly hurricanes that many Americans will be recovering from for a long time to come? Blame climate change. By extension: blame those who reject Carbon-reducing “solutions” to climate change.

Forbes, in its hard-hitting way, has provided its references, so let’s check.

Hurricane Milton hit Florida hard earlier this month. Without climate change, it wouldn’t have been as bad, according to scientific researchers.

This first link goes to a website called “Yale Climate Connections,” which contains nearly identical text to what is in the Forbes article. So, kudos to Forbes for not stealing without (some) attribution, but this site is not a scientific source. Yale Climate Connections is, according to its own press, “an initiative of the Yale Center for Environmental Communication.” Headlining their site is this:

We know you’re worried about climate change. So are we.

Yale Climate Connections is a news service that aims to help you understand the reality of climate change and what you can do about it.

News service. Journalists? Maybe. Scientists? No. Foregone conclusions? Definitely.

Back to Forbes then.

Hurricane Milton was wetter, windier and more destructive because of climate change, according to a study by the international scientific group World Weather Attribution. 

Click on that link and try to read the analysis in question. It is opaque and full of caveats and jargon. Through the obfuscating tangle, however, you find the conclusion, like a beacon, stated repeatedly. Here is just one example among many of the conclusion that World Weather Attribution has arrived at:

we find that heavy 1-day rainfall events such as the one associated with Milton are 20-30% more intense and about twice as likely in today’s climate, that is 1.3°C warmer than it would have been without human-induced climate change.

The problem with this conclusion is that it is missing one critical element: evidence.

The whole analysis is based on models. I have lots to say about the risks of relying on models, especially when you treat the output of those models as if they’re empirical data, but put those concerns aside for the moment. Let’s assume, for the moment, that the models are accurate. Let’s assume that the modelers are correct, and that in modern times, temperatures are higher than they were historically, and that in turn, higher temperatures correlate with more extreme storms.

Why, though, are there higher temperatures in the first place?

The modelers have not established the anthropogenic nature of the higher temperatures. In fact, they have not even tried. “Human-induced climate change” is an assumption made by the researchers, but it is being presented as a conclusion of their analysis.

I would love to be wrong about this—not because I’m rooting for anthropogenic climate change, but because I’m rooting for science. The work being done here is not close to my core area of expertise. Perhaps I’ve missed something, or misunderstood something, or misunderstood many things. I hope and I trust that if that is true, someone will bring it to my attention.

I doubt it, though.

Here’s the thing:

I am really, really, really tired of having science paraded in front of me that doesn’t turn out to be science. “Scientists find X” all too often means “Scientists modeled Y and extrapolated Z and snuck in X at the end because that’s the conclusion they were shooting for all along.”

If I were to rewrite the “scientific analysis” being promoted by Forbes and Yale and presumably many others this week, it might read like this:

Extreme storms are doing great damage. Models suggest both that temperatures are higher than they used to be, and that extreme storms are more likely when temperatures are higher. The only explanation that we are willing to consider for why temperatures are higher is anthropogenic climate change.

That would be honest. But it would be too transparent, and many people would see the problem. The problem is that careful scientific analyses do not posit only one possible explanation for observed phenomena.¹

Thus, this is not careful scientific analysis. It is conclusion-driven, model-based, propaganda.²

That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, mind you. It might be right. Personally, I suspect that we are having an impact on the atmosphere, and therefore the climate, with our industrial behavior.

I also have reason to think that there are other, non-anthropogenic forces that are affecting our climate. And I do wonder why we’re not talking about them.

---

Meanwhile, “news services” from the Ivy League are spreading the good word far and wide, and legacy business magazines are getting in on the evangelism as well. It’s a new religion, with a distinctly unreligious sounding name. It’s the religion called “The Science.”³ Because of the name it’s been given, it has fooled a lot of people. But actual science is withering on the vine.

---

Shortly after the error of reading email on my phone first thing, I went out into a bracing and vibrant Autumn day and stood barefoot in the wet grass. The cool Earth thrummed below, and the Sun warmed my face. Actual birds—not the ones captured on my phone—chirped and twittered in the bushes. All of that did something to mitigate the bad start I had gotten. Try it. You might find that it helps you, too.

Hurricane Helene approaching Big Bend of Florida. Photo is a 3D render of a Topo map with clouds from September 26, 2024. Photo credit: Frank Ramspott / Getty.

1. And again, this research is not even dealing with observed phenomena. It’s producing extrapolations from models.

2. I intended to analyze the links in the first three, rather than two, paragraphs in the Forbes newsletter, but ran out of steam. The third link goes to a study that is, in its framing and errors, nearly identical to the second: it is entirely based on models, but far worse than that, its conclusion is foregone—terrible storms can only be due to anthropogenic climate change, even though what caused the high winds is not part of the model. Once again, an assumption is being presented as the conclusion.

3. I spoke about how “The Science” is replacing science in schools at Rescue the Republic—here is the speech, and here is a transcript.