Help Wanted:  Storyline Developer – Watts Up With That?

Opinion by Kip Hansen — 18 July 2024 — 650 words/3 minutes

In the spirit of co-operation, I’d like to help publicize the effort of Ed “Show Your Stripes” Hawkins, a climate crisis hawk at University of Reading in his search for  “a motivated researcher to develop storylines of extreme weather events, including their attribution.”

You see, the first part of the job is to develop storylines of extreme weather events.   You might think that his just means “make up stories”  or maybe “invent Just-So stories” for extreme weather events, then blaming them on Climate Change.     You might be right. 

The Extreme Weather Event Storylines are important for the types of climate science done in Hawkins’ department at University of Reading – supplying quotable storylines blaming climate change for extreme weather events to The Guardian and other media gets the University and Hawkins  in the news and helps bring in research funds. 

This Post-doc will be guided by a technique made-up by Hawkins himself:

“This project will develop a reanalysis-based approach to translate observed historical and recent extreme weather events into different climates to quantitatively describe how those weather events and their impacts would be different in warmer or cooler ‘counter-factual’ worlds.”

Oh, yes, the “reanalysis-based approach” is to be based on Hawkins et al. 2023:  “ESD Ideas: Translating historical extreme weather events into a warmer world”.

Note:  “Earth System Dynamics  [ESD] – An interactive open-access journal of the European Geosciences Union”.

Here’s a sample:

“A new reanalysis-based approach is proposed to examine how reconstructions of extreme weather events differ in warmer or cooler counter-factual worlds. This approach offers a novel way to develop plausible storylines for some types of extreme event that other methods may not be suitable for. As a proof of concept, a reanalysis of a severe windstorm that occurred in February 1903 is translated into a warmer world where it produces higher wind speeds and increased rainfall, suggesting that this storm would be more damaging if it occurred today rather than 120 years ago.”

and

“Whenever a severe weather event occurs with harmful impacts in a particular region, it is often asked by disaster responders, recovery planners, politicians, and journalists whether climate change caused or affected the event. The harmful impacts are caused by the unusual weather, but climate change may have made the weather event more likely, more severe, or both. In those cases, the harmful impacts may be partly or even mostly due to the change in climate. In some cases, the worst consequences may be due to the vulnerability or exposure of the local population or ecosystems, or due to a combination of many other factors.”

This not-so-scientific approach only seeks to “develop plausible storylines” – in short, just something that the general public, ignorant as they are as to the real causes of weather and climate, will be willing to swallow without question – you see, the storyline just needs to be  plausible:

Plausible — that’s Hawkins’ word, not mine.  The storylines they want are not even intended to be scientifically valid.

Readers might want to read the proof of concept example in the paper…a masterpiece of model fiddling, cherry-picking multiple-model-runs output for the run that supports one’s hypothesis and the unholy hubris involved with the pretense that climate models of the past, present or future output single, definitive and true representations of moment-in-time regional single-factor weather features.

But, hey, the position pays well: