ROME — Climate change alarmists are no longer hedging their claims about global warming with conditionals, but now assert with confidence that human-induced climate change is without doubt the cause of summer heatwaves.
Never mind that summer heatwaves have been occurring regularly since human history began, the heatwaves of 2022 are no longer the result of natural cyclical weather patterns but are now caused by anthropogenic climate change, Euronews declared Monday.
“We know that global warming is the cause, and it’s a straightforward connection to make during a heatwave,” writes Lottie Limb (she/her) in reference to high temperatures in the UK and wildfires in France, Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Croatia.
Ms. Limb goes on to assert that an average global temperature rise of 1.5C “will be disastrous for many countries” while global warming is already causing an increase in “the amount of weather at the ‘extremely hot’ end of the spectrum,” making extreme heat events “more frequent, longer, and more intense.”
With remarkable (if confusing) precision, Limb confidently states that a heatwave that would have struck one in 50 times in the pre-industrial climate will now “strike five times more often.”
One is obliged to assume that this alleged increase in probability of heatwaves explains Ms. Limb’s assurance that the 2022 heatwave must be one of those that would never have occurred were it not for cows belching and air conditioners spewing carbon dioxide.
To back up her claims, Limb cites Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at the UK’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, who states: “I think we can very confidently say that every heatwave occurring today has been made more intense and more likely because of climate change.”
While assertions of greater likelihood hardly constitute verifiable “causality,” Limb goes on to confidently insist that “we no longer need to wait for ‘attribution studies’ to prove that climate change is making heat events worse.”
Mariam Zachariah, who also works at the Grantham Institute, said that “the message is that we have to start acting, and I do have a lot of hope for us; if we act in time we can do enough to adapt and mitigate climate change for the future.”
Despite the passionate hubris of certain climate alarmists, however, the simple fact is that we have no idea what average global temperatures would be this week had humans never trod planet earth. We also do not know what would happen to global temperatures were every person to start driving an electric car and drinking through paper straws.
The joy of climate alarmism is, of course, that you don’t really need to know, as long as you repeat yourself often enough and employ ever more heated rhetoric for your claims.
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