Data Refutes Media’s ‘Attribution’ Con That Climate Change Boosted Dubai’s Rainfall

Time to put the great(?) climate attribution con game to bed permanently. By assuming what it’s trying to prove it becomes seriously unconvincing. Talk of ‘fingerprints of climate change’ is more like waffle than science.
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A few media outlets, including CNN and BBC, have run recent articles talking about flooding in Dubai, claiming that climate change made the storms worse. This is false, says Climate Realism (via Climate Change Dispatch).

There is no evidence that climate change made the rain more extreme, instead, evidence indicates that El Niño and even cloud-seeding may have contributed.

Both the BBC’s article, “Deadly Dubai floods made worse by climate change,” and the one posted by CNN, “Scientists find the fingerprints of climate change on Dubai’s deadly floods,” reference a study done by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group, which claimed that climate change made the rain events 10 to 40 percent more intense than if global warming was not occurring.

CNN’s writer says global warming is the likely driver of heavy rainfall in Dubai “because the atmosphere in a 1.2-degree warmer world can now hold 8.4% more moisture, which is making extreme rain events more intense.”

These claims are nonsense, and worse, non-scientific, for the simple reason that not only does data not show that heavy rainfall is becoming more intense or common, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) doesn’t even claim that any sign whatsoever will even begin to emerge, according to their own projections, until well into the future.
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The best description of how these attribution studies work was given by statistician Dr. William Briggs in a paper compiled by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Dr. Briggs wrote:

All attribution studies work around the same basic theme. … A model of the climate as it does not exist, but which is claimed to represent what the climate would look like had mankind not ‘interfered’ with it, is run many times. The outputs from these runs is examined for some ‘bad’ or ‘extreme’ event, such as higher temperatures or increased numbers of hurricanes making landfall, or rainfall exceeding some amount. The frequency with which these bad events occur in the model is noted. Next, a model of the climate as it is said to now exist is run many times. This model represents global warming. The frequencies from the same bad events in the model are again noted. The frequencies between the models are then compared. If the model of the current climate has a greater frequency of the bad event than the imaginary (called ‘counterfactual’) climate, the event is said to be caused by global warming, in whole or in part.’

Fundamentally, attribution science cannot be proof of human influences on the weather via climate change because it begins with the assumption that any given weather event is being influenced by climate change.

In other words, the model is designed with the outcome in mind, making it impossible for them to “discover” anything to the contrary.

Full article here.
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Image: Dubai – Sharjah’s King Abdul Aziz Street [credit: BBC News]