Sorry, Mainstream Media, Climate Change Is Not Responsible for the Recent Heatwave
As a Google News search of the term “climate change,”  shows, the mainstream media is abuzz with claims made by a group of  researchers that human-caused climate change was the cause of the recent  extreme heatwave that struck the Northwestern United States in early  July. This claim is false.
 As the stories themselves acknowledge, similar high temperature  events occurred in the past, long before humans began emitting  significant amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. In addition,  data show the heat wave was a weather event, for which long-term climate  change can’t have been a factor.
 The 
BBC and the 
Spokane Spokesman-Review, among other media outlets, hyped research from 
World Weather Attribution (WWA), claiming the Pacific Northwest’s 2021 heatwave was the result of human-caused climate change.
 A CBS News article, titled 
“Pacific Northwest heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change, experts say,” was typical of the mainstream media’s uncritical coverage of WWA’s research.
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 “Just a week ago, the Pacific Northwest —  a place normally known for its cool and wet climate — endured the most  extraordinary heat wave ever observed there in modern times,” writes CBS  News. “The extremity of the heat wasn’t just unusual — it would have  been ‘virtually impossible without human-caused climate change,’  according to a new analysis by 27 climate scientists from the World  Weather Attribution network.”
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 What’s “virtually impossible” is to produce a peer reviewed study  less than a week after an extreme and unexpected event “proving” almost  anything about it.
 Of course, the research was not peer reviewed and was not published  in a peer reviewed journal. Rather it was self-published by WWA, an  organization formed in 2014 in particular to, in its own words,  establish that the
 “emerging science of extreme event attribution could be operationalised.”  In other words WWA is a self-appointed group of scientists committed to  the theory that humans are causing dangerous climate change, who  believe through the use of a crystal ball, sorry, computer models, they  can establish particular extreme weather events would not have happened  absent a modest global average warming of about 1 degree Celsius.
 Previously the organization produced non-peer reviewed studies  claiming individual instances of extreme cold, drought, and rainfall  events would not have happened absent global warming. In fact, no actual  data proves any particular weather event is due to or even more likely  to have occurred as a result of human caused global warming.
 Data assembled by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panels on Climate Change  (IPCC) and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration  presented at 
Climate at a Glance show, extreme instances of 
cold, 
drought, or 
floods  have not increased in number or severity amidst the modest warming of  the past 150 years. If extremes are not getting more extreme, how can  one attribute a particular extreme event to human-caused global warming,  as opposed to the natural factors that caused such events in throughout  history? The honest answer is, one can’t.
 WWA itself called the heat event in the Northwestern United States a  1-in-1,000-year event, meaning, although it is rare, it has occurred  many times before in the earth’s history without any human influence.
 As my colleague at The Heartland Institute, award-winning meteorologist Anthony Watts recently pointed out in a 
Climate Realism post, titled 
“Heatwave Reporting Illustrates How Science Has Been Corrupted with Climate Groupthink,”  data show us that more high temperature records were set during the  first half of the twentieth century than during the past 50 years. Even  the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 
confirms this.
 During the recent heatwave temperatures exceed the norm for the area  by more than 20 degrees in some locations, far above the 1 to 2 degree  temperature rise attributed by some scientists to human greenhouse gas  emissions. In addition, though it was largely ignored by the mainstream  media, the recent heat event in the Northwest was followed by a record  setting drop in temperatures, as much as 52 degrees in some location, as  the heat dome moved eastward.
 Weather is not climate. NOAA 
writes,
.
 “Weather reflects short-term conditions  of the atmosphere while climate is the average daily weather for an  extended period of time at a certain location. … Weather can change from  minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day, and season-to-season.”
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 As Watts notes,
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 “When record heat and record cooling both happen within a 24-hour period, that’s inarguably weather, not climate.”
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 Watt’s analysis was confirmed by University of Washington Professor Cliff Mass who wrote in 
his own analysis of the heatwave:
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 “[T]here has been a substantial amount of  miscommunication and unscientific handwaving about the recent Northwest  heatwave. [g]lobal warming only contributed a small about (1-2F) of the  30-40F heatwave and that proposed global warming amplification  mechanisms (e.g., droughts, enhanced ridging/high pressure) cannot  explain the severe heat event. … [H]igh-resolution climate models do not  produce more extreme high temperatures under the modest global warming  of the past several decades and that global warming may even work  against extreme warming in our region. Importantly, this blog  demonstrates that there is no trend towards more high-temperature  records.”
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 Extreme event attribution, is pure speculation: sideshow fortune  telling given the veneer of scientific legitimacy by referencing  computer model projections. In the case of the Northwest heatwave,  evidence indicates it is woefully, scientifically unjustified  speculation at that.
 Astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan once said, 
“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Extreme event attributions are the epitome of extraordinary claims and the mainstream media should treat them as such.
 Rather than simply parroting the scary claims made in a press release  from climate alarmists, CBS News and other media outlets should require  that those claiming an extreme weather event has been caused by human  actions to provide solid evidence their claims are true. Neither CBS nor  any of the other outlets promoting WWA’s unproven claims required such  evidence. Shame on them.
https://climaterealism.com/2021/07/...e-is-not-responsible-for-the-recent-heatwave/