Friederike Otto, High Priestess of the Church of Climatology™

A discussion of Friederike Otto's seminal 2016 paper™ 'The Art of Attribution', incl. musings about the credentials, arguments, and creed of the Church of Climatology™

Today, we’ll take another look at the Church of Climatology, and the reason I’m using this moniker should be pretty obvious by the time we’re done today: like Scientology—now, that would be a perfect term, but, alas, it’s already taken—Climatology™ is a kind of (death) cult, and whatever the merits of the original arguments about human-caused environmental impacts, its most outspoken protagonists are often less-than-excellent scholars who get pushed by legacy media outlets for (almost) no apparent reason.

Remember two years ago when Climatologists™ claimed it was the hottest summer in 125,000 years? Well, turns out that Dr. Karsten Haustein—German legacy media’s go-to expert™ back then—was a WEF ‘Agenda Setter’:

'Technocracy, Inc.' 2.0: Queer 'Climate Expert™' Revealed as WEF 'Agenda Setter'

And that particular combo is where we’ll talk, once more, about Dr. Friederike Otto, that other German-born climatologist™ working at that notorious fake factory, Imperial College. For background, C.V., and her accomplishments, please see this piece:

The Greatest Grift of All (7): Climatologists™ Beyond Switzerland Demand More Funding

In that piece, we explored her underlying credential—her 2012 Ph.D. dissertation—and today we’ll look at what Dr. Otto is actually (in)famous for: Weather Attribution. Here’s why—straight from her faculty profile at Imperial (emphasis mine):

In 2020 Climate Change Attribution was named one of MIT Tech Review’s top ten breakthrough technologies. In 2021 Fredi was recognised for her co-founding of WWA on the TIME100 list as one of the world’s most influential individuals, according to the renowned TIME magazine and as one of the top 10 people who made a difference in science in 2021, by the journal Nature.

Fredi is the author of the popular science book "Angry Weather" and her work has been featured extensively in global media including the FT, Economist, Times of India, the Sun, Wall Street Journal, Telegraph, Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, Daily Mail, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, BBC, and CNN.

Dr. Otto is also very much at home at the WEF, much like her fellow ‘agenda contributor’ Dr. Zeke Hausfather (another one of these climatologists™ cited by legacy media as a go-to source of occult wisdom).

And this is why we’ll be taking a close look at the underlying science™ of Weather Attribution today.

In what follows, emphases and [snark] are mine.

F. Otto (2016) ‘The Art of Attribution’

Our enquiry into these matters commence with a rather strange and very brief paper published in Nature Climate Change vol. 6, pages 342–343 (2016). Bearing the odd title ‘The Art of Attribution’, Dr. Otto knows at least a little bit of art history (where ‘attribution’ is wide-spread, if controversial, practice of, in the National Gallery’s words,

an assessment of who was responsible for creating a particular work.

Attributions are made with different degrees of certainty, depending on factors such as style and documentary and scientific evidence.

Basically, what ‘attribution’ means to art historians—is endless more or less opinionated squabbles over who made a piece of art in the absence of clear and unambiguous evidence.

This is the background to Dr. Otto’s seminal and highly influential paper to which we now turn. Don’t worry, it’s not a very long read (barely two pages), but you’ll be surprised, I surmise, once we’ve made our way through it, how swift her and her collaborator Geert Jan van Oldenborgh rose to fame—from that 2016 paper to becoming, in less than five years, no less, on of our time’s ‘top ten breakthrough technologies’ according to the MIT Tech Review.

Hence, I give you—‘The Art of Attribution’ by Fredi Otto (2016) [references omitted]:

A high-impact weather event that occurred at the end of a decade of weather extremes led to the emergence of extreme event attribution science [a one-off event triggers an intrepid young researcher to try to make her mark]. The challenge is now to move on to assessing the actual risks, rather than simply attributing meteorological variables to climate change [guess what they’re still (!) doing: the ‘simple’ attribution nonsense]…

Coumou and Rahmstorf’s Review [endnote 1, Coumou, D. & Rahmstorf, S. Nature Clim. Change 2, 491–496 (2012)] in Nature Climate Change of the strong evidence linking many weather records broken since the beginning of the century to human influence on the climate is by no means old news. Some of the events they described have since become paradigmatic, studied over and over again. Most remarkably, this publication, together with a few other landmark studies, marked the beginning of a whole new branch of climate science [Dr. Otto recognised a grift when she saw one—and jumped on the bangwagon], and facts that then passed almost unnoticed are now subject to fierce debate.

The detection and attribution of long-term trends in observed records (mainly temperature) has been routinely carried out at least since the second IPCC report in 1995. But attributing individual extreme events was deemed impossible until later, when the theoretical possibility was first described [endnote 3, which relates to Myles Allen’s commentary entitled ‘Liability for climate change: Will it ever be possible to sue anyone for damaging the climate?’, Nature vol. 421, pages 891–892 (2003), which was at least honest about the grift: climatologists get to become expert™ witnesses for the mother of all tort litigation] and then applied to show that the likelihood of the European heatwave of 2003 was at least doubled due to human influence [endnote 4, which relates to Stott, P. A., Stone, D. A. & Allen, M. R., ‘Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003’, Nature vol. 432, pages 610–614 (2004), which uses HadCM3 projections (used for the 2001 IPCC report) that, in the words of the referenced article, ‘do not account for systematic errors in the shapes of the modelled patterns or uncertainties due to missing forcings (for example, land use changes or fossil-fuel black carbon emissions)’, to say nothing about clouds, earth’s albedo, and the like—in short: it’s a very crude and faulty model to which Stott et al. have added several sets of estimates and interpolations]. However, it took another paradigmatic event, the Russian heatwave of 2010, to push the scientific community to start scrutinizing the methodologies of analysis as well as the events themselves, and to realize the importance of defining events and framing the exact question that any study attempts to answer [this is important as all prior attribution efforts foundered on the shoals of the equivalent of what the French historian Fernand Braudel has called ‘a dialogue of the deaf’ (by which he meant cross-disciplinary misunderstandings resulting from the use of shared terms with different meanings]. It is not that obvious from a meteorological perspective why the 2010 Russian heatwave in particular is so famous, as there have since been many other extreme events around the globe that had impacts at least as high. It was, however, the first extreme weather event analysed in two extreme event attribution studies [here, Dr. Otto comes up with a yuuuuuuge gaffe (blunder): she admits that what ‘weather attribution’ really is—is nothing but the functional equivalent of the proverbial drunkard looking for his lost car keys under a streetlamp, not because he lost them there but that’s where the light is] with apparently contradictory results [are you surprised?]. One study analysed the magnitude of the event and found no significant anthropogenic signal [endnote 5, Dole, R. et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 38, L06702 (2011)], whereas another found that such a heatwave was five times more probable compared with pre-industrial times due to anthropogenic climate change [endnote 6, Rahmstorf, S. & Coumou, D. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 108, 12905–17909 (2011)—note that Rahmstorf & Coumou are the same two authors who, in 2012 (see endnote 1, above) performed a ‘review’ of the existing literature: talk about confirmation bias]. Soon after, these views were reconciled when it was shown that these are two complementary aspects of an event [endnote 7, Otto, F. E. L., Massey, N., van Oldenborgh, G. J., Jones, R. G. & Allen, M. R. Geophys. Res. Lett. 39, L04702 (2012), which was co-authored by—Fredi Otto and her fellow Attributionist™ G.J. van Oldenborgh, as well as M.R. Allen (he of endnote 3): talk about confirmation bias, eh…] and not mutually exclusive [again, endnote 1, which is the Review by S. Rahmstorf & D. Coumou with which Fredi Otto began her discussion: talk about cyclical argumentation].

I’m jumping over a few more lines of un-edifying prose here.

One of the harder challenges is based on the fact that we expect that the probability of all these heatwaves and extreme rainfall events occurring will only increase under the assumption that all else remains equal [so, what do we do if the weather doesn’t conform to this expectation™? It appears to be ‘we’ll massage the data to avoid a reckoning with faulty presumptions’ (relates to the original ‘Climate Gate’ some 15 years ago) while a 2.0 version appears to be in the making (to say nothing about the UK MetOffice’s ‘estimates’ of data™ in lieu of non-existing weather stations)]; in other words, that climate change does not affect the atmospheric circulation [get the argument™: climate change is real and man-made, the climate system is, of course, complex (which means pesky non-experts™ may not speak about it), and the changes we’re describing are uni-dimensional—we note, in passing, that this is a trained philosophy of science Ph.D.-holding climatologist making up such nonsense; on a related note, WTF were the peer-reviewers and editors thinking (having) when they nodded reading this?]. But as Coumou and Rahmstorf [again, endnote 1] point out, this may not be the case [two captains obvious here]. Identifying changes in the dynamical [sic] drivers of extreme weather events requires climate models that can reliably simulate these drivers [translation from the academese: existing climate models can’t, hence climatologists™ of the past didn’t find anything]. Not all general circulation models are up to this task, which led some scientists to conclude we should not even try [endnote 8, Trenberth, K. E., Fasullo, J. T. & Shepherd, T. G., Nature Clim. Change 5, 725–730 (2015)]…Although this is a well-established fact, model evaluation has been remarkably absent in many attribution studies (such as ref. 11) [i.e., there are no controls for previous attribution attempts]—however, further scrutinizing reveals that general circulation models suitable for this purpose do actually exist (for example, ref. 12), and that robust attribution of the overall change in risks of devastating extreme events is far from impossible today [endnote 13, Shepard, T. Curr. Clim. Change Rep. 2, 28–38 (2016), which, hilariously, has a section entitled ‘The Risk-Based Approach’, which starts of as follows: ‘The risk-based approach to extreme event attribution is fundamentally probabilistic [i.e., it’s a statistical/mathematical artefact] and requires creating two sample populations, a ‘factual’ (the world as it is) and a ‘counter-factual’ (the world as it would have been without climate change)
[note the dual fallacy: both the ‘factual’ and the ‘counter-factual’ input are—made up: the former is based on a model of ‘the world as it is’ (i.e., numerous variables, gross over-simplifications, extrapolations, etc.) and the latter is similarly a model ‘of the world as it would have been without climate change’ (any comparisons to, say, calculations of ‘vaccine effectiveness’ by comparing twice-injected with ‘boosted’ individuals are purely co-incidental)].

But when analysing such changes in the overall risk, we consider an event as a class, and not as an individual entity—exactly as it happened [two things: first, note the sleight-of-hand—any individual weather event is, if you will, collectivised (made part of an imaginary/speculative group) before, second, it is analysed ‘exactly as it happened’ (which, as historians know, was the original conceptual approach pioneered by Leopold von Ranke who sought to describe events ‘as they really were’; needless to say, historians have since moved on, yet for whatever reason, climatologists™ are stuck in a conceptual-methodological mindset of some 175 years ago]. Recently, there has been some controversy over whether a very narrow definition of an event can lead to informative attribution studies, given that each event is unique and will never occur again [endnote 14, Stott, P. et al. WIREs Clim. Change 7, 23–41 (2016), who was (see above, endnote 4), the first one to propose something like weather attribution, beginning to have second thoughts: ‘evidence for human influence on the probability of extreme precipitation events, droughts, and storms is more mixed…geographical coverage of events remains patchy and based on the interests and capabilities of individual research groups…For event attribution assessments to be most useful, remaining scientific uncertainties need to be robustly assessed and the results clearly communicated [i.e., previous efforts have failed to deliver on these things]. This requires the continuing development of methodologies to assess the reliability of event attribution results and further work to understand the potential utility of event attribution for stakeholder groups and decision makers.’ (note that this nis more a poli-sci paper than a science one…]…

Here follows some more stuff that climatologists™ got right™ in the past, yet, as Fredi Otto notes in her concluding musings,

we will need to start with major advances in what Coumou and Rahmstorf [2012, endnote 1] presented as a prerequisite to every attribution study: high-quality observational data [translation: we lack said data]. We can make progress there, but to do so we will need to enlarge the community to include scientists from all regions of the world [translation: so far, we’ve compared what we had data on, not what is].

Bottom Li(n)es

Let’s fact it, the ‘Art of Attribution’ in climatology™ is about as much a contest of comparative opinions as it is in art history. Yet only one of these two fields as it is commonly practiced is actually a truly honest attempt to figure out stuff with an open mind.

Earlier, I mentioned the proverbial joke about the drunkard looking for his lost car keys under a street lamp, not because the keys were lost there but because that’s where the light would be at-night.

As stupid as it sounds, that’s about the most apt description of Weather Attribution according to the Church of Climatology™.

Moreover, the level of argumentative sleight-of-hand is very high in the above paper™, as are the logical inconsistencies and the weakness of the core argument advanced. Careful reading shows that Fredy Otto departs from a paper (Rahmstorf & Coumou 2012, endnote 1), discusses a handful of papers not found in that review, and returns, in the end, to the very same paper’s conclusions. Talk about circular reasoning (sic).

Yet, none of this—or Dr. Otto’s equally mind-numbing dissertation, for that matter—seemingly played a role for MIT Tech Review back in 2020. I mean, just let the methodology as related by Fredi Otto sink in:

[Friederike Otto] So when we want to find out whether climate change did play a role, we use observations [weather events] and different climate models and simulate what is possible weather in the world we live in today. And because we know very well how many greenhouse gases have been added [do we?] into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution, we can take these out of the atmosphere of our climate models, and so we can simulate a world that might have been exactly as it is today, but without man-made climate change [talk about logical fallacies: as if greenhouse gases would be the only driver, or the one single variable that, all other things being equal, matter]. And because the only thing that is different between these two worlds is man-made climate change, we can attribute this change, or this increase in likelihood, to climate change.

Next up, that kind of argumentative sleight-of-hand hasn’t stopped Dr. Otto from becoming an apostle of the WEF or her nomination as one of the ‘women in science we admire’ in 2023 because she is

A highly recognised expert in the field of attribution research, she examines the extent to which human-caused climate change as well as vulnerability and exposure are responsible for particular events such as heat waves, droughts and floods.

Dr. Otto’s accolades didn’t stop then and there, though, as this equally fawning piece in The Nation from three weeks ago testifies:

Friederike Otto is a leading practitioner of arguably the most important development in climate science in many years: attribution science [sic]. Specialists like Otto can now calculate how much responsibility man-made global heating has for a given extreme weather event…

Attribution science reveals what role climate change played in a given weather disaster.

For journalists, such calculations are invaluable. Attribution science equips us with the data [sic, much like with the Swiss glacier collapse?] to connect the dots between climate change as a distant abstraction and climate change as a current reality—and to do so quickly, when our audiences are feeling those impacts [i.e., it’s all click-bait stuff]. Which means journalists can dispense with the once-standard line that climate change cannot be linked to any single event, only to long-term trends. Attribution science changes that.

Journalists will find Otto’s book Climate Injustice useful for its descriptions of how attribution science works—how do scientists know what they know?—as well as its limitations…

Trained as a physicist [at the master’s level; her Ph.D. is in Philosophy of Science], Otto ventures beyond physical science in this book to make a moral and practical argument grounded in economics, history, ethics, and public policy.

I’ll spare us the rest of this nonsense, but I shall cite some comments by Dr. Otto who was interviewed by the website Watson.de in late December 2023—about her book, and the interview is entitled, ‘What the Climate Crisis has in Common with Sexism’ (orig. Was die Klimakrise mit Sexismus zu tun hat; translation mine):

[Watson] Why doesn’t the climate crisis affect us all equally?

[F. Otto] Because we are not all the same. Because we have very different ways of protecting ourselves and participating in society. And the less we participate in society, the less we are able to protect ourselves…

[Watson] What do you mean by climate justice?

[F. Otto] Climate change is a problem created by our economic system [and here I thought it’s physics and chemistry, you know, simple, scientific things: silly me]…So to achieve climate justice, we need to change our economic and social structures. We can only combat climate change if we also combat inequalities in society…

[Watson] The book cover says that the climate crisis is linked to sexism. Why is that?

[F. Otto] The climate crisis is not sexist per se. But sexism in society makes it easier to hold on to and insist on the colonial-fossil narrative.

(Editor’s note: this means that the climate crisis is a crisis that is mainly characterised by inequality and the dominance of patriarchal, colonial, and fossil structures) [I’m not making any of this up, by the way].

[F. Otto] From a global perspective, it is primarily men who benefit from this. What’s more, the effects of the climate crisis hit women much harder than men. This has to do with the different roles in society [so, if we’d now abolish the Patriarchy™, the climate crisis will hit everybody equally hard, right?]

I’ll stop here.

My brain aches after these contortions. Let’s simply conclude, for the time being, that there’s little empirical evidence that stands up to scrutiny.

That fact is then weaponised by grifters like Dr. Otto to obtain more grant funding to perpetuate commentary like in that Watson interview about her book, Climate Injustice.

In that book, Dr. Otto is so far removed from her masters-level training (physics) and her Ph.D.-level work (philosophy of science) that it boggles the mind that no-one bothered to kinda ask her about these credentials—if only because the lack of relevant credentials is typically levelled at non-experts™ as a first line of defence: you’re not a climatologist™, hence your thoughts don’t matter.

We saw exactly the same BS with Covid™, and we’re observing that kind of knee-jerk reaction every time something comes up that must not be considered outside the Overton Window.

In addition to every other criticism this kind of stance should engender, the consequences of such behaviour are obvious: group-think, confirmation bias, and in-group aggression vs. everybody who dares to know.

Climatology™, then, is but one of the occult creeds of the anti-enlightenment crowd. Of course, in truly Satanic fashion, their practitioners masquerade as paragons of reason, progress, and science.

Upside down.