There is the attempt to link current weather to long term climate, to use computer models to achieve the evidence, and to alarm the public and policy makers that climate change is real and here.
Nature published two papers yesterday that discuss increasing precipitation trends and a 2000 flood in the UK. I have been asked by many people whether these papers mean that we can now attribute some fraction of the global trend in disaster losses to greenhouse gas emissions, or even recent disasters such as in Pakistan and Australia. I hate to pour cold water on a really good media frenzy, but the answer is “no.” Neither paper actually discusses global trends in disasters (one doesn’t even discuss floods) or even individual events beyond a single flood event in the UK in 2000. But still, can’t we just connect the dots? Isn’t it just obvious? And only deniers deny the obvious, right? ….
In short, the new studies are interesting and add to our knowledge. But they do not change the state of knowledge related to trends in global disasters and how they might be related to greenhouse gases. But even so, I expect that many will still want to connect the dots between greenhouse gas emissions and recent floods. Connecting the dots is fun, but it is not science.
And Andrew Revkin goes to town in his New York Times blog about how uncertainties and caveats disappear when a political corner is being fought:
….. In scientific literature you rarely see statements so streamlined and definitive. For climate science, this is the equivalent of a smoking gun. News indeed. Add in the extreme floods last year (a period not included in the study) and you have more relevance, although Roger Pielke Jr. this morning notes the importance of distinguishing between analysis of certain kinds of extreme precipitation events and disastrous flooding.
The problem is that the Nature paper is not definitive at all, as you’ll see below.
None of this detracts from the importance of this work, or the overall picture of an increasingly human-influenced climate, with impacts on the frequency of gullywashers.
But this does raise big questions about the standards scientists and journals use in summarizing complex work and the justifiable need for journalists — and readers — to explore such work as if it has a “handle with care” sign attached.
This is not about “ false balance.” This is about responsible reporting.
A previous instance occurred in 2006, when a paper in Science on frog die-offs in Costa Rica included this firm and sobering statement:
Here we show that a recent mass extinction associated with pathogen outbreaks is tied to global warming.
Things were far more complicated, of course, as you can read in my 2008 piece on Vanishing Frogs, Climate and the Front Page.
