RUTHFULLY YOURS

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain, but only in My Fair Lady. On October 29 and 30, 2024,  it fell elsewhere with tragic consequences: the loss of over two hundred lives and widespread damage in the Valencia region. Almost as surprising as the downpour’s intensity was the rush by agencies in this space to conclude it was caused by the bogeyman apparently driving most natural disasters today: “climate change”. 

An alternative explanation is that the weather gods were up to their old tricks. After all, a so-called extreme weather event (EWE) happens somewhere in the world every day. So the probability was high they might conjure up one just a week before COP29, as indeed they did last year.  Storm Bettina made landfall in Eastern Europe on November 28, 2023, just days before COP28, the annual UN climate conference. It too was attributed promptly to nasty anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

The COP29 Conference of the Parties is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, from November 11 to 22, 2024. After 28 years of talks, the event is being promoted, optimistically, as a Climate Action Summit. How many people does it take to change the climate of a whole planet to suit everybody everywhere and forever? At least 40,000, judging by the number of delegates this year. Good luck with that exercise of breathtaking hubris, the bureaucratic equivalent of collective hara kiri, at least for the developed world.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres had a familiar message: immediate steps must be taken to cut [carbon dioxide] emissions, “safeguard people from climate chaos”, and “tear down the walls to climate finance”, especially given what he described as this year’s “masterclass in climate destruction”. It was déjà vu all over again.

COP29 is yet another attempt by the developing world to monetize the climate and raise “trillions of dollars to protect lives and livelihoods from the worsening impacts of climate change.” Yet most countries were silent on the irony of China’s chutzpah: the world’s largest coal consumer, biggest solar panel manufacturer and now space explorer, still claiming developing country status and putting its hand out for billions of dollars of free money.

There is, of course, no suggestion here that the agency rush to judgement mentioned above might have been due to activist researchers so dazzled by confirmation bias – and now underwritten by fabulous funding from both governments and private entities – they could not resist making confident claims about climate causation, such as detecting the “fingerprint of climate change in complex weather events”; or that the MSM is happy to provide them with a media megaphone without further scrutiny, or to question the veracity of their claims. 

Nevertheless, dear reader, here’s an intriguing case for your consideration. On October 31, 2024, just a few hours after the Spanish deluge, BBC’s climate editor, Justin Rowlatt, posted this article: Deadliest weather made worse by climate change – scientists.

Human-caused climate change made the ten deadliest extreme weather events of the last 20 years more intense and more likely, according to new analysis.

The killer storms, heatwaves and floods affected Europe, Africa and Asia killing more than 570,000 people.

The new analysis highlights how scientists can now discern the fingerprint of climate change in complex weather events.

The study involved reanalysing data for some of the extreme weather events and was carried out by scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group at Imperial College London.

“This study should be an eye-opener for political leaders hanging on to fossil fuels that heat the planet and destroy lives”, said Dr Friederike Otto, co-founder and lead of WWA.

“If we keep burning oil, gas and coal, the suffering will continue,” she said.

Just four days later, on November 4, 2024, WWA itself released a statement: extreme downpours increasing in southern Spain as fossil fuel emissions heat the climate. It had performed a “super rapid analysis” on the observational data. While it was “not a formal attribution study,” WWA was faster than quick-draw Wyatt Earp to identify what it believes caused the late October deluge.

To investigate if climate change influenced the heavy rainfall, we determine if there is a trend in the historic rainfall observations in the region. The three analysed datasets indicate that heavy 1-day rainfall events, as intense as the one observed, are about 12% more intense and about twice as likely in today’s climate, that is 1.3°C warmer than it would have been in the cooler preindustrial climate without human-caused warming.  

These results are based on observational data and do not include climate models that are used in full attribution studies. However, the results are in line with existing evidence of climate change signals in similar past extreme daily-rainfall events that have been studied across Europe. They are also aligned with basic physics and the so-called Clausius-Clapeyron relationship, which outlines that a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, resulting in a 7% increase in heavy rainfall with 1°C of warming. We are therefore confident the changes in heavy rainfall are driven by human-caused climate change. 

Only a seven per cent increase in heavy rainfall with an increase of one degree centigrade of warming hardly seems alarming. In any case, with what alchemy does WWA, or indeed any agency, distinguish the weather’s natural variability from “human-caused climate change”?

WWA’s analysis also “built on a relatively sparse literature on rainfall extremes in the region”. In other words, poor data. And why did it include the following paragraph, which appears to contradict its conclusion?

Working group 1 of the sixth assessment report of the IPCC found evidence of an increasing trend in rainfall extremes in western and central Europe, but with low confidence of the human contribution to this due to limited agreement (IPCC, 2021). Furthermore, projected changes in such extremes vary strongly by location and season, especially in the study region in this analysis, which suggest a wetting trend in winter and drying in summer (Wood & Ludwig, 2020).

How did WWA decipher this EWE and reach such an emphatic conclusion in less than a week? Was its “super rapid analysis” driven more by a desire to turn the Spanish downpour into another scary storyline for the Imperial College climate research team to promote in Baku, when it presented there on November 11, the first day of COP29?  The so-called facts in this case surely were not massaged to achieve other objectives.

Whatever the case, if the fate of humankind depends on the insights – and prejudices – of professional readers of the Earth’s atmospheric entrails, perhaps it would be prudent not to ignore their warnings. Yet, on the balance of probabilities, it’s hard to deny that the sequence of events outlined above has a fishy smell about it. A sceptic might conclude a random EWE – in this case the rain in Spain – may have been weaponised to support the alarmist mood at COP29. 

Such a view arguably becomes more credible on discovering that WWA’s main benefactor is The Grantham Institute. It sits “at the heart of Imperial College London’s work on climate change and the environment, with the mission: “to lead on world-class research, policy, training and innovation that supports effective action on climate change.”

The Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment entity was created in February 2007 with a multi-million-pound donation from the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. It was the largest sum of private funding given to UK climate change research at the time. The aim: to create a global centre of excellence for research and education on climate change at Imperial College London.

The Granthams hope that their donation will motivate other individuals to support research into the causes, consequences and mitigation of climate change with a view to informing policy on an international scale.

The Grantham Family established the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment in 1997. The Foundation supports natural resource conservation projects both in the US and internationally. Jeremy Grantham is a well-known investment manager and chairman of Boston-based investment firm, GMO. Hannelore Grantham is Director of the Grantham Foundation.

The Foundation also supports our partner institutes: the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (London School of Economics), the Divecha Centre for Climate Change (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) and the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures (University of Sheffield). (Source: The Grantham Institute)

Jeremy Grantham remains the long-term investment strategist at the firm he co-founded in 1977, Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co. (GMO). He still serves on its asset allocation committee and board of directors. In an interview with Morningstar on October 9 this year, Grantham said he was as concerned as “every scientist in the climate business”.

Morningstar: You spend a lot of time thinking about climate and environmental issues more broadly. Renewables have clearly made a lot of strides, electric vehicles, and yet carbon emissions remain stubbornly high. As a climate solutions investor, what you’re excited about these days?

Grantham: Well, what I consider important is the ability of senior people to miss the point. Climate change is like some giant python. It’s got us gripped and it isn’t squeezing that tight yet. But each year it’s getting a little tighter and it shows no inclination to go away and we’re ignoring it. If we continue to take climate change this lightly, if we continue to protect our short-term profits and ignore longer-term consequences to the general world, we will have a very hard time maintaining a stable world, stable social, stable corporate, stable anything. And I would say, to me, on a global basis, it looks like we’re quite a handful of years into a destabilizing mode and the climate change has a lot to do with it.

The Grantham Foundation has 90% of all the money I’ve ever made: 50% is in venture capital, maybe closer to 60% today, and half of that is green. So, we get a ringside seat at what is going on.

As for the World Weather Attribution group, it was formed by Imperial and The Grantham Institute in 2014 with the explicit aim of “changing the global conversation around climate change, influencing adaptation strategies and paving the way for new sustainability litigation.”  In other words, funding a smorgasbord of controversial extreme event attribution computer games, green ideology and climate politics. If the ultimate objective is litigation, perhaps “conversation” is the wrong word.

The group says it has “performed more than 80 attribution studies on heatwaves, extreme rainfall, drought, floods, wildfires and cold spells around the world.”

WWA is very much on the same page as its benefactors, as is clear from some of the comments made here: Imperial experts call for action on finance health and loss and damage at COP29.

Having an agreement about the amount of money and where that money’s coming from […] will be one of the most significant outcomes of COP29. — Mike Wilkins, Executive Director, Centre of Climate Finance & Investment, Imperial Business School.

The shrinking carbon budget shows the importance and urgency of near-term emissions reductions. — Professor Joeri Rogelj, Director of Research, Grantham Institute – Climate change and the Environment.

One of the important decisions that needs to happen at COP29 is who can access the loss and damage fund. — Dr Friederike Otto, founder and lead of World Weather Attribution.

Grantham is right. Climate change has become a global “business”, presumably very profitable for carbon cowboys and green investors like GMO, at least unless the renewable energy music stops for some reason, such as a decline in public gullibility about the “climate crisis”. There’s another python on the planet too: the sperm count.

Grantham: In terms of pessimism, in a sense, you ain’t heard nothing yet. Because in my opinion, there’s not just one python squeezing us, there’s two—the other is toxicity. If we do not move against toxicity, we are going out of business. And to give you the most shocking single number, our sperm count, which is the best indicator of general health, is down to a third of what it was in 1950—and 1950 was not a healthy place to be. Hunter/gatherers a few thousand years earlier would have been much healthier. And it’s falling at an accelerating rate. One of great epidemiologists who study this said, “It’s as if we mean to go out of business.” The drop since 2000 is over 2.5% a year from where we were. And the drop in the 20th century was closer to 1.5%. But no one gives it rat’s tail.

Amen