Hurricanes, Climate Change, and Statistical Sleight-of-Hand

 Doomsayers wasted no time identifying the destruction wrought by Hurricanes Helene and Milton as "Proof" of climate change.

Linking individual weather events that have occurred since time immemorial to long-term changes in climate has spawned a new academic field, called attribution science.

Because it is impossible to prove a specific weather event was the result of human-caused climate change the way a criminal is proved to have committed a crime, attribution science uses old-fashioned statistical legerdemain to link human-caused climate change to individual events.

Attribution science uses climate models to determine the statistical likelihood of an individual event if there were no human-caused climate change, in other words, without any greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and agriculture.

A climate model might determine the likelihood of a catastrophic flood, such as the one that devastated Montpelier, Vermont, in July 2023 to be once every 500 years.

Because there is no evidence that the number of hurricanes has increased over the last century or more, rather than estimating the change in the likelihood of the number of hurricanes, the change in the likelihood of the severity of hurricanes is estimated.

Statistical attribution studies depend entirely on the accuracy of climate models-and their assumptions-to calculate counterfactual likelihoods.

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2024/10/15/hurricanes_climate_change_and_statistical_sleight-of-hand_1065317.html