Floods are manmade, you say now?

Floods are manmade, you say now?

JoNova
21 February 2011

After twenty years of drought predictions that turned out to be not worth a rhinestone rune-stone, the acolytes of the scare campaign were keen to find some evidence that they were still “right”. Two new papers came along showing that, golly, warming really “formally” “officially” caused floods after all, and they were just what the PR-doctor ordered. So the BBC, ABC, and the usual suspects rushed out to talk about how it was now “proven” that any flood was now officially man-made with a “robust” study and the “first scientific evidence” of a link. Richard Black even got excited that the study was based on “real world data”, which makes you wonder which studies used the fake sort?

If it’s all so definitively proven and obvious now that it’s a shame they didn’t think to join these dots, say, two years ago, so they could warn the world beforehand. It must be frustrating for them that they always seem to get the forecasts right two years too late. It’s another post hoc “prediction”.

And what are these two (TWO! shouted the believers) papers based on (AND don’t forget they’re from Nature)? The new-found certainty comes from about 50 years of records, interpreted by climate models, with those results then fed into precipitation models (just to magnify the error-margins even further). The handy thing about models is that if you try hard enough you can get nearly any result you want.

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