Every so often we still meet some tap-room philosopher in the bar of the Dog and Duck who trots out the old line “Wurl, no one’s never PRUVED dis bad wevva is dahn ter cloimit chainge, ‘av dey?” We talk about droughts in Africa or floods in America; and the ancient 33 player arm comes out, drops into some pre-recorded groove: and the old song plays again. You can’t blame them really. The other side may be terrible at science, but they sure know how to run a media campaign, and they quickly fill the empty notebooks and studios of busy journalists before the careful, reasoned opinions of scientists have even been sketched out.
World Weather Attribution [1] is now trying to remedy this aching void. Run by a group of experts in disciplines like meteorology and physics, they carry out studies of extreme weather events, and try to tease out how the likelihood of each being caused by global warming, and what the extra impact of human activity was in each case. Unlike their well-funded opponents their work is peer-reviewed and carried out by people with professional training. They have built an impressive portfolio of rigorous case studies and try to build links with journalists who might want to build a balanced investigation of these complicated issues.
We hope their work is not too late. We fear it may be. If an organisation like this had been around at the time of the vaccine controversies, many lives might have been saved. If similar organisations could inform the arguments on migration, many more might be saved in future. We hope that, by visiting their pages, you will wish them well too.
[1]https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/
#climate change #global warming #weather event #drought #flood #disinformation
Learning, Science and Society 