The Little Black Wolf, on the beach outside of Asotin, WA

One of the more recent, fascinating aspects of the societal fight over CO2 and its attribution, solely through modeling, toward Global Warming (if not Anthropogenic Global Warming) is how GW is portrayed in the media. The drumbeat is constant — more hurricanes, more extreme weather events, all killing more and more people, and of course, causing more and more property damage.

The problem with this take is that basically none of it is true. In this piece by Roger Pielke, a professor emeritus from UC-Boulder, in climate science, he very agnostically takes apart the statistics, and the signal therein, regarding potential change in weather from climate change. Short version — some evidence of heat waves, some evidence of increased precipitation, but no flooding. No evidence of really extreme weather events, and hurricanes, etc. Inside the piece is a video that’s well worth watching. Roger is actually pretty milquetoast in his declarations, supporting the impossible-to-support CO2 hypothesis of climate change, while at the same time showing that not much is really going on there with the biblical plague aspect.

By any standards, it’s a reasonable, from an emotional perspective, view, and hard to fault him on it.

One of the things that I and my colleague, Joe Biello, another full professor in mathematics, specializing in atmospheric science, have been working on, though, is the larger question of ‘attribution’. Attribution is the process of assigning a given hurricane to having a root cause of AGW, and CO2, and then arguing for Net Zero or some other CO2 reduction philosophy, that even the true believers attest will make no change until after we are all long dead. But the fear engine must be stoked, and apparently the larger AGW community decided that just global temperature rise wasn’t going to do it. We had to go the biblical plague route to get the peasants to start screaming. And here we are, bombarded with catastrophe after catastrophe, all leading in a straight line to AGW. Even though the basic statistics show this is garbage. That’s attribution.

What’s interesting is when you constantly insist, even AGAINST the scientific consensus that there has been no change in the Atlantic Meridional Ocean Current (AMOC) that Europe is going to freeze, and the world is literally going to end through its reversal, you open up some serious memetic Dark Matter possibilities. Dark Matter, in the physics lexicon, is all that stuff that you can’t see in the universe, that still pulls everything else around. You can’t see it, you don’t know it’s there, and its only evidence is how it affects everything else.

But the core memetic thought here is that Dark Matter is very meta-cognitive-y! Far easier to look at the flood and scream it’s a mental model that everyone is familiar with, and tell them if they don’t listen to you, they’ll be dead. Some serious psychopathic energy you’ve got pumping!

But nothing keeps going without money. Let’s say you’re an insurance company. Your board is bombarded with the message that AGW is going to create extreme weather events. These are in the future, of course — this is insurance. And most of the actuarial information comes from models, that alternately predicted sea level rise of 8′, or no ice at the North Pole by 2014. You sign one of those modelers on as a chief consultant — don’t want to be caught holding the bag.

And then you have seven years of no serious hurricanes. The news doesn’t report the hurricanes, because they basically never happened, even though extreme weather events were supposed to increase — but didn’t. Yet you charged out, through your policies, which were highly supported by the governments, especially in blue states, because of the hysteria. It’s what people believed! And they screamed about The Science – even though the actual science was clear on what was happening.

Now who’s making Dark Matter bank?

P.S. In case you’re wondering if this shows up on the bottom line, consider this graph from American Association for Justice — record profits in the insurance industry for the last number of years.