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Flawed Attribution Study Falsely Blames South Africa’s Floods On Climate Change

by L. Lueken, July 31, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatc

Durban, South Africa flood
A recent post at Phys.org claims that a recent attribution study shows that climate change made April 2022’s flooding in South Africa “significantly” worse. [emphasis, links added]

This is an unfalsifiable (not able to be proven or disproven experimentally or observationally) claim that ignores the complexities of weather and relies on distinctly unreliable computer modeling.

The article, titled “Climate change significantly worsened deadly 2022 Durban floods, study shows,” goes over an attribution study that focused on flooding in Durban, South Africa, three years ago.

Phys.org claims the study “shows that rainfall during the storm of 11–12 April 2022 was between 40 percent and 107 percent heavier than it would have been in a cooler, preindustrial climate.”

How do they know this? They don’t; rather, they claim it based on computer model outputs.

Unlike most coverage of attribution science, Phys.org vaguely hints at the fact that the modeling is less than bulletproof, explaining that the models “simulated the storm in both today’s warmed climate and a counterfactual world without human-induced global warming.”

Climate Realism has explained at length why attribution modeling is not evidence, but it may be helpful to point out that Phys.org is only half right here.

They indeed used a counterfactual world with no warming, but the warmed model is also counterfactual. A number of assumptions, some more robustly backed by available data and evidence than others, go into modeling the “current world.”

Statistician Dr. William Briggs has what I consider the best simple summary of how attribution modeling works:

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climate-debate

Are direct water vapor emissions endangering anyone?

by Real Climate, July 31, 2025

In the EPA EF reconsideration document there is a section on p62 where they attempt to make the argument that the CO2 endangerment finding would also apply to direct water vapor emissions to the atmosphere, which is (according to them) obviously absurd. But both claims are bogus.

First off, the definition of pollutant in the Clean Air Act (CAA) clearly does include CO2 as well as water vapor. This was the point litigated in Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007:

An air pollutant is defined as any substance, or combination of substances, including physical, chemical, biological, or radioactive matter, that is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air and may reasonably be anticipated to cause or contribute to air pollution.

A Hazardous Substance is further defined as one “that can cause or may reasonably be anticipated to cause adverse health or environmental effects“.

So there are two factors to assess. First, is the substance emitted into the air? (Yes, for both CO2 and water vapor). Second, might it be reasonably anticipated to cause adverse effects? (This is precisely the point of the Endangerment Finding process!). Thus it is not self-evidently absurd that water vapor emissions might be regulatable under the CAA, but the issue is whether there is any evidence that these emissions might plausibly have adverse effects.

It’s worth listing some pertinent comparisons between CO2, water vapor and a criteria pollutant like SO2 (which oxidises to SO4), to see the differences:

Substance CO2 SO4/SO2 Water Vapor (H2O)
Perturbation timescale(s) > 1,000 years ~ 2 weeks ~ 10 days
Increase over background since 19th Century (%) > 50% ~350% (Greenland, 1980) ~ 4% (since 1979)
~ 9% (estimate since 1900)
Anthropogenic direct emissions ~ 36 GtCO2/yr ~ 130 MtSO2/yr (1980) ~ 21 GtH2O/yr
Anthropogenic sources Fossil fuel combustion, deforestation Sulfur in coal, biomass burning Irrigation, combustion
Attribution of anthropogenic direct sources to atmospheric increase ~ 90% 100% ~4%
Impact of climate feedbacks ~ 10% (ocean/soils etc.) 0 % ~ 96% (impact of T on saturation vapor pressure)
Adverse effects of increase Increased heat waves, sea level rise, etc. Acid rain, public health, agricultural yield More intense rainfall, enhanced global warming

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better to know...?, climate-debate

The German “Summer From Hell” That Never Came…Earlier Wild Forecasts Backfire

by P. Gosselin, July 29, 2025 in NoTricksZone 

Already as early as May 2025 predictions of a hellish record-breaking hot summer with possibly thousands of heat deaths were forecast – much of it based on the unusually dry and warm spring that had gripped much of Central Europe at the time. 

Hat-tip: Frank Bosse at Klimanachrichten

The online Frankfurter Rundschau printed a weather column by meteorologist Dominick Jung just over 2 weeks ago, on July 13, warning of a “looming, huge heat dome” for the rest of the summer over Central Europe.

German TWC meteorologist Jan Schenk had already made a prediction in Focus magazine on June 10, 2025: “According to this, we can expect extreme heat and drought in Germany, especially in July and August.”

Then came reality.

Just recently, even the climate-alarmism purveyor Der Spiegel had to concede that “it feels more like autumn.”

Plenty of rain has been falling, along with snow high in the Alps.

So what was behind all the ridiculous hellish-summer forecasts? Veteran Swiss meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann in an interview with the online Bild called all the constant exaggerations and distortion: “Symbols of an education problem with us.”

At the end of June, 2025, after having made ridiculous made predictions a year earlier in 2024, biologist Mark Benecke lectured again on climate and weather to an auditorium, showing such weather model maps:

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climate-debate

Natural Disasters in 2024 – A Quarter Century Without Change

by L. Budyn, Aug 1, 2025 in SciClimEnergie

On this specific topic of natural disasters, the managers of the database we will be using here consider it reliable from the year 2000 onward.

We are therefore approaching the 30-year period that the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) defines as the minimum required to establish “climate normals”[1], used to define and analyze climate evolution. These reference periods allow current data to be compared with past averages and to identify long-term climate trends and changes.

In this case, the diagnosis seems inescapable : if the stability — or even the decline — in the frequency of natural disasters is confirmed, then the potential link between global warming and natural disasters would become a purely academic hypothesis. Interesting from a theoretical standpoint, but lacking any observable factual basis.

Yet this stands in stark contrast to what various international agencies — and their media spokespersons — have been claiming repeatedly over the past 25 years. They have not hesitated to speak of a “doubling”[2] or even a “fivefold increase”[3] in the number of natural disasters over this period, all of which, of course, is attributed to anthropogenic global warming.

How, then, will they reconcile the stability observed in the real world with the alarmism so often relayed in the media ?

We therefore await, with some curiosity, the ad hoc explanation that will justify, in this particular case, abandoning the 30-year reference period. Climate alarmists will need to explain why this criterion — endorsed by the WMO itself — would no longer reflect long-term climate trends, as it is intended to do.

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