Climate Crusaders Turn to Flimsy ‘Extreme Event Attribution’ to Bring Down Oil, Gas, and Coal

First, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a non-governmental institution, soon issued a report designed to advance the cause of “extreme event attribution,” a questionable scientific premise designed to point fingers at specific corporations and activities based on how much they contribute to worsening weather calamities.

Second, left-wing media, led, as usual, by the Democratic Party’s top communications tools such as the New York Times, produced stories on the report, kicking off the echo chamber of coverage designed to legitimize the finding, alarm the public and amplify the call to arms.

“The nation’s top scientific advisory body issued a report on Thursday backing a growing field of science that could help governments hold oil, gas and coal companies responsible for the damage caused by extreme weather,” the Times breathlessly announced.

While the Times was careful to say that the new report “doesn’t make recommendations on how attribution science should be used in policy and the law,” the fact remains that for many on the left, a primary reason for the report is in fact to use it as a weapon in policy and the law.

Unintentionally humorous is the Times’ own follow-up line acknowledging that “attribution findings could be relevant in several types of legal cases.”

Any examples?

“In a $50 billion lawsuit against oil companies,” the story reported, “Multnomah County in Oregon cited an attribution study that concluded that a record-shattering 2021 summer heat wave in the Pacific Northwest would have been ‘virtually impossible’ without human-caused climate change.”

According to the story, computer models studying weather events now allow scientists to “estimate the likelihood of similar events in a hypothetical world that industrialized nations hadn’t warmed by emitting heat-trapping gases. They can scour historical records for past instances in which atmospheric patterns lined up a certain way, then examine how much hotter or rainier the weather was when those same patterns appear today.”

Right. And with the alleged ability to determine how much variation can be attributed to human activity comes the added ability, the left hopes, for governments and courts to hold corporations in the fossil fuel business accountable.

For the political left, it’s not enough to control the biggest megaphones on earth – the far-left (formerly mainstream) media – which eagerly delivers the radical climate change mantra to the world.

They want more than that. They want their theories embedded in regulations and, most importantly, codified into law. They want accusations against fossil fuel companies to be analogous to guilty

convictions, no questions asked.

To achieve their goals, they insist that “the vast majority” of scientists all agree on one point of view, while never quantifying such blanket assertions. How many scientists are there in the world? How many are climate scientists or even meteorologists? How many, exactly, agree with one conclusion? How many disagree?

The lazy far-left media – lapdogs for the ultra-liberal movement – don’t demand that answer. They simply parrot the company line. The Times does the same, claiming, “Scientists have long understood that global warming, driven by greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, is making certain kinds of extreme weather more intense and more likely.” Which scientists? Out of how many?

The Times article claims that the study on which it bestows such importance “was prepared by a committee of 14 scholars representing meteorology, law, sociology, civil engineering and other disciplines.”

Fourteen? Seriously? And they were not even all climate scientists? No. There were “scholars,” however that’s defined, from law, sociology and “other disciplines” – maybe woodworking or candle making?

To be sure, there are some scholarly examinations questioning the science of “extreme event attribution” to be found, including this one by Roger Pielke Jr. (not an overall climate change skeptic). The bottom line is that this is the flimsy foundation on which the left would have the world put the brakes on natural gas, oil and coal, the most effective energy providers in human history.

And since the free-market system is doing a lousy job of putting those commodities out of business (because people like using them), the climate crusaders turn to government and the courts, flooding those venues with political treatises labeled “science” and insisting that anyone objecting to their propaganda is “anti-science” or a “climate denier.”

Buying into the notion of “extreme event attribution” is a slippery slope leading to quicksand. Can we identify the precise added level of obesity that can be blamed on a specific candy bar maker? Will researchers claim to know which content on which social media platform led to a specific increase in crime? Is the day coming when we can sue a public school district because only 73% of its graduates enjoyed career success, compared to 82% of a neighboring district’s graduates?

At best, “extreme event attribution” is an interesting hypothetical exercise – an educated guess. It is no more than that. It will be a tragic day when governments and courts start relying on it as hard evidence – and a warning to candy bar makers to lawyer up.

Gary Abernathy is a longtime newspaper editor, reporter and columnist. He was a contributing columnist for the Washington Post from 2017-2023 and a frequent guest analyst across numerous media platforms. He is a contributing opinion columnist for The Empowerment Alliance, which advocates for realistic approaches to energy consumption and environmental conservation.