New media reports blame climate change for the “unprecedented disaster” unfolding in Houston, alleging that climate change-related factors undoubtedly “worsened the flooding.”
Never missing an opportunity to preach of the evils of climate change, the UK-based Guardian newspaper claims that the Houston storm surge “was half a foot higher than it would have been just decades ago, meaning far more flooding and destruction.”
Oddly, the Guardian acknowledges that “some of” the sea level rise is due to human disturbance such as oil drilling, but immediately throws the bulk of the blame to “climate change.”
The essay is titled “It’s a fact: climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly” and was written by Michael E Mann, “distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University.”
Mann goes on to argue that climate change has also caused sea surface temperatures in the region to rise, producing an increase in average atmospheric moisture content. “That large amount of moisture creates the potential for much greater rainfalls and greater flooding,” he asserts.
Mann then makes a gratuitous and baseless claim that all of this somehow necessarily results from anthropogenic climate change.
“Human-caused warming is penetrating down into the ocean. It’s creating deeper layers of warm water in the Gulf and elsewhere,” he alleges. “The combination of coastal flooding and heavy rainfall is responsible for the devastating flooding that Houston is experiencing.”
The Guardian’s conclusion?
“Harvey was almost certainly more intense than it would have been in the absence of human-caused warming, which means stronger winds, more wind damage and a larger storm surge,” Mann announces.
One may well wonder when “almost certainly” entered scientific jargon. One may also wonder how no climate scientist was able to predict Hurricane Harvey and yet once it happens they know “almost certainly” that it was aggravated by “human-caused warming.”
Fortunately, there are other—more modest—climate scientists who are willing to acknowledge just how much science cannot tell us about climate.
Dr. Duane Thresher, who has a PhD in climate science from Columbia and NASA GISS, told Breitbart News that attributing specific climatic events to global warming is simply dishonest.
“It is a fundamental fact, although increasingly ignored, that no single climate event or location can be attributed to global warming,” Thresher said.
“There is simply no valid way to prove a connection and correlation is not causation.”
According to Thresher, relying on simple correlation leads to absurd conclusions like the following:
“As global warming has supposedly been occurring, the average human lifespan has significantly increased. Therefore, global warming causes increased human lifespans,” he said.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome
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