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

In a totally predictable move, the Science™ desires ever more funding, despite more-than-pertinent questions about their methods, climate modelling, and personal integrity

In yesterday’s posting about the collapsed glacier-cum-landslide near Blatten, Switzerland, I alluded to the preposterous nature of the Science™’s reaction: of course, the glacier collapsed because of human-made climate change; nevermind the fact that the Birch glacier had been growing in recent years.

The Greatest Grift of All (6): Swiss Glacier Collapses, the Science™ Points at Climate Change™ w/o Any Data

Of course, this immediate, knee-jerk reaction to a seemingly random event is to perform what the Science™—here personified by climatologist (their word) Dr. Friederike Otto—calls ‘The Art of Attribution’. I’m not making this up, for this is actually a paper™ that appeared once in Nature Climate Change 6, pp. 342–343 (2016), but note that it’s paywalled (if you’d like a copy, drop me an email).

As today’s article will go over yet another part of griftopia commonly referred to as Climate Science™, we must go through that brief paper™ by Dr. Otto and spend a few moments on her background before, in a second step, I’ll provide you with a few choice quotes from legacy media pieces from Norway and Austria to illustrate the issues at-hand.

As always, non-English content comes to you in my translation, with emphases and [snark], as well as poignant commentary, added. All opinions expressed below are, as always, mine alone, however unpalatable and uncharitable you (or my employer) may find them.

Meet the Expert™

Before we delve into the subject-matter, a few words about the main character in what less looks like the rigorous application of the scientific method, as opposed to a third-rate vaudeville routine from the early years of the 20th century.

The main character I’d like to introduce you to is Dr. Friederike Otto, also known as Fredi, according to her Wikipedia profile:

As of December 2021 works as a Senior Lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London.^[1] She is an Honorary Research Associate of the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at the University of Oxford.^[2]

Ah, that wonderful and totally non-biased institution known as Imperial College (hi, Prof. Neil Ferguson and your less-than-experty advice for decades); I do not mean to suggest Dr. Otto’s research is as faulty and error-riddled as her colleague’s—because at-first we’ll look at her stuff below.

As an aside, please let me ‘splain’ the Oxford association: if you go to such fancy-name places and get paid a salary (via regular employment), you will get a regular job title. Although I’m unsure about the technicalities in this particular case, as a general rule, if you go to such fancy-name places on your own dime (by which is typically meant: grant money, i.e., someone else’s dime), however, you get whatever ‘job title’ plus terms indicating this less-tight affiliation, e.g., ‘associated researcher’ or ‘honorary associate’. I, for one, do know that because I once held a named visiting professorship at one of these fancy-name places (in the US and not in the UK, though, but I digress).

Having clarified this kind of preliminary stuff, let’s see what Dr. Otto does research-wise (this is still from her Wikipedia entry):

Her research focuses on answering the question whether and to what extent extreme weather conditions change as a result of external climate drivers. A highly recognized 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 events such heat waves, droughts and floods. Together with climate scientist Geert Jan van Oldenborgh she founded the international project World Weather Attribution which she still leads.

I kept the links here to permit you an easier (sic) descent into that particular rabbit-hole of ‘World Weather Attribution’, and before we turn to that, let’s briefly consider Dr. Otto’s career so far (still Wikipedia):

Friederike Elly Luise Otto graduated in physics from the University of Potsdam before earning a PhD in philosophy of science from the Free University of Berlin in 2012.

So, our distinguished climatologist™ (whatever that means) holds a master’s degree in physics—and a Ph.D. in the humanities. Please let that sink in.

Of course, Dr. Otto boasts a ton of faculty profiles (Imperial; Oxford), yet it’s interesting to note that her foundational contribution—the Ph.D. dissertation—is not listed among her ‘15 most relevant academic publications’ in her C.V. hosted by the German Federal Environmental Agency (Umweltbundesamt).

Imagine, if you will, a dissertation so unimportant and, apparently, irrelevant to whatever one is doing thereafter, academically™ speaking, that it’s kinda omitted.

To that point, I note that Dr. Otto’s German-language C.V. is quite telling—as it qualifies many of the qualifications and achievements listed in English-language venues, such as her professorship, which is given as ‘Professorin (Senior Lecturer)’, because in German-language academia, the title is very much restricted to those who went through a proper and regular Berufungsverfahren (the procedure of selection and appointment). As an aside, the rank of a ‘senior lecture’ is typically converted into that of a ‘reader’, i.e., an associate-level professorship.

You’re probably not surprised by the following snippets of information from her Imperial College faculty profile:

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.

She’s about as mainstream as climatologists™ come, and I bet you didn’t know (or cared) enough that Dr. Otto is also very much at home at the WEF (surprise); note, however, that the WEF had at least the rectitude to be honest about the misinformation in the faculty profiles and C.V. mentioned before: Dr. Otto is listed as ‘Acting Director’ (not Director, as she put it in her C.V.) and ‘Associate Professor’ (not ‘Professor’, as she put it on her faculty profiles—and Dr. Otto must know that kind of stuff matters™ as her C.V. includes that title ‘senior lecturer’ to clarify her professorship, but I digress).

Here’s her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled ‘Modelling the earth's climate - an epistemic perspective’ (Free U Berlin, Germany, 2012), by the way, whose abstract reads as follows:

Climate models and climate modelling are a central part of climate science with particular importance for long term prognoses of future climate development. In the context of global climate change, which is a fact [sic] undoubted [sic] by climate scientists [what is a climate scientist and how does one become one?] but sceptically discussed in the public, their importance not only for climate sciences is increasing. However, most findings of climate modelling approaches are highly uncertain and span a very broad range of values for climate variables and impacts of climate change. Climate models are different from experiments in physics [ouch, I suppose], thus their results must be valued accordingly. Furthermore climate models are epistemically very different from physics theories, which are normally topic of the debate in the philosophy of science [that is actually a fair point: why don’t we debate climate models across the humanities to test their epistemic coherence? Oh, I forgot, ‘97% of climate scientists’ (a fake claim if there ever was one) are opposed to doing so]. In this thesis climate modelling is analysed according to ascertain the epstemic [sic] status of climate models and to discuss its consequences. Climate modelling is not based on a comprehensive physics theory and is not analogous to experimenting [a very fair and supremely telling point, which Dr. Otto somehow forgot™ after she obtained her Ph.D. in philosophy of science; while speculative to a certain extent, but I suppose the subsequent (to her Ph.D. defence) award of grant money from the ‘Bezos Earth Fund’ (2021-25) and the grifting via the ‘World Weather Attribution’, which performs ‘Rapid Attribution’ studies™ that are ‘peer-reviewed’ and hosts a dedicated ‘Reporting Guide for Journalists’ in several languages]. Moreover, climate models play a double role as an outsourced human brain and a copy of the earth and are thus something in between an experiment and a theory in progress. Due to this fact several problems of climate modelling result, two of which are fundamental and others are principally to overcome but practically pressing [I didn’t change the bad language here, by the way]. The fundamental problems of understanding the climate system are the nonlinearity of the system and lack of observational data [so, models are just that: a more or less piss-poor reflection of reality]. The main practical problem of climate modelling is the problem of parameterisation, which is the need to represent processes of the climate system in the modelling approach that are insufficiently understood or on a smaller scale than the resolution of the model [in other words: the models™ are not fine-tuned enough, which permits the more or less arbitrary designation of any event as ‘just a case study’ or its correct™ ‘attribution’, depending on the desired framing]. Parameterisations in nonlinear models make it nearly impossible to detect chains of causes and effects in a climate model [mind you, this is Friederike Otto’s 2012 Ph.D. dissertation in which she—correctly, points to the epistemic problems and real-world consequences of climatology]. Therefore an intransparent method of fitting the model to data, which is called tuning [basically, climatology adjusts the theory™ if observational data do not fit it: this is a whole lotta things, but it ain’t science], results in manipulated physics of the climate model and prevents a meaningful analysis of the modelling results. As a conclusion of this thesis certain rules are provided that could avoid abuse of climate model tuning. Furthermore basic guidelines are provided to make the climate modelling process more transparent in general and thus to refer to the main uncertainties integral to climate modelling appropriately.

I did read the dissertation a while ago; the language is piss-poor, which detracts from the substance of the argument (which is, believe it or not, actually quite coherent, as indicated by the above-cited abstract). I suppose you already figured out the linguistic issues in the above-reproduced abstract, and I’m linking to her dissertation to make yet another point:

The entire dissertation—for which Friederike Otto received a Ph.D. diploma, no less—holds but 119 pages of text. This is quite in line with STEM requirements, but in the humanities—to which the subject ‘Philosophy of Science’ (sic) belongs, much like my own field, History—such qualification theses are conventionally around 300 pages. On a less-than-superficial level, what troubles me, in addition, is the absurd manner in which Ms. Otto cites throughout her dissertation (the below example is from p. 41):

As Edwards (2001) defined the problem, “without global data sets, modelers could neither validate nor parameterise their models. Without computers and satellites, uniformly gridded global data sets could not even be created, much less manipulated. Without numerical weather prediction models and GCMs, these data could not be understood.” But the purpose, the object of a reanalysis model, is different from that of a model to simulate future climate development, to understand processes of the climate system or to predict future climate development.

There’s no footnote—and the reference cited looks like this in the bibliography (p. 130):

Edwards, P. N. (2001). Representing the global atmosphere. In C. A. Miller and P. N. Edwards (Eds.), Changing the Atmosphere. The MIT press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I found the quote on pp. 48-9 (but in-between, Ms. Otto changed the spelling from American to British English).

Of course, Dr. Otto has since moved on, and we must equally move on, but before we do so, I refer you, dear readers, to the ‘Reporting guide for journalists’ at the World Weather Attribution homepage whose core mission is this:

Following an extreme event with severe impacts, a great deal of public interest is generated in its causes. Increasingly, the dominant question is: “Was this event caused by climate change?” This guide is intended to help journalists navigate this question.

Here’s the guide in question, and I’ll delimit myself to a brief quote from the Foreword on p. 5:

The first extreme event attribution study, using models, was published in 2004 after a heatwave in western Europe in the summer of 2003.

In other words: the ‘peer-refereed literature’ is, as of this writing, 21 years old. Talk about ‘historically unprecedented’ events is, therefore, a plausible view with regards to the past 21 years, and with these preliminaries out of the way for the time being—we’ll probably revisit Dr. Otto and her fellow Attributionists before too long—here are some choice quotes from the media spin.

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Climate Scientist Warns of New Type of Avalanche After Glacier Collapse in Switzerland

Warmer weather and thawing permafrost are increasing the risk of landslides in European mountain areas, including Norway.

By Isabel Müller Eidhamar and Regine Engelina Hatvik, NRK, 30 May 2025 [source]

[…I’ll spare you the second-hand reporting™ about what happened in Switzerland, for which I’ll refer you to yesterday’s piece].

Much of the ice melted into water, and the landslide became a floating mass with extra high speed.

This is how climate researcher Ketil Isaksen at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute [see his official profile: he works on Arctic ecology] explains it to NRK:

This type of landslide is very dangerous. The landslide can travel a long way and quickly bury valleys [that’s quite true, but then we’d have to be talking something akin to so-called pyroclastic qualities.

Isaksen points to climate change as a catalyst:

This is a new type of landslide that we don’t have as much experience with and which can be more dangerous:

If climate change continues in full force, as many indications suggest, there are many things we need to take into account in the years to come.

[here, NRK introduces the next subject, asking ‘can something like this happen here?]

Like Switzerland, Norway has a number of glaciers [there’s of course a difference between correlation and causation, which doesn’t trouble journos™ or climatologists™ alike].

But is it likely that a similar avalanche could happen in this country?

We can't rule out the possibility of it happening in the future, but we don’t know of any ice mass collapses like the one in Switzerland. But we have to keep an eye on things here too.

NVE [that would be Norway’s Energy Directorate, and if you’re wondering why they would employ such climatologists™, it’s because some 90% or so of Norway’s electricity comes from hydropower] glacier researcher Liss Marie Andreassen told NRK:

The glaciers have shrunk considerably in recent years. There are major changes in the Norwegian glacier landscape.

With a changing glacier landscape, the Norwegian glaciers are being monitored.

We have around 40 glacial lake locations that we monitor using satellite imagery. We look at whether glacial lakes are increasing in size and whether new ones are being formed [that’s what the Science™ does: looking at satellite images over time; most of this can—and will be—automated with AI™ in the near-term, rendering climatologists™ obsolete]. We also carry out sightings [what an afterthought…].

NVE is keeping a close eye on the Norwegian glaciers, but at the same time they are not worried about a similar event happening in the near future:

We don’t know of any glacial lakes that can cause very serious damage today:

Incidents can also happen with Norwegian glaciers, but we haven’t had any such incidents in the past [thus spake the Science™].

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Intermission

I’ll spare us all the remainder of this piece, and while we must move on to Austria state broadcaster ORF in due time, I must note the utter insanity passing for both journalism™ and science™ here:

• Swiss geologists have been closely monitoring, with on-site data collectors, the Birch glacier for years. The did so knowing that they ‘haven’t had any such incidents in the past’.

• All the NRK-quoted climatologists™ can muster is, ‘well, ahem, we don’t know’ and ‘that’s a new one’, even though Climate Science is basically tantamount to our puny attempts to comprehend non-linearity in large, complex systems.

If you ever required any evidence for the utter irrelevance of such mainstream climatologists™ to further understand our condition, well, look no further—but there is one other aspect to note, which is why we must have another look at one of these pieces of legacy media reporting™.

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Climate Researchers Find Harsh Words

Although a direct link between the climate crisis and the glacier collapse in the Swiss village of Blatten can only be scientifically proven by appropriate studies, climate researchers are already increasingly speaking out on the subject. Climate change is the framework condition for a catastrophe like the one in Switzerland, explained high mountain researcher Jan Beutel…

Via ORF Online, 30 May 2025 [source]

In the years 2022 and 2023 alone, Swiss glaciers lost ten per cent of their mass—as much as in the entire period from 1960 to 1990 [all fine and well, but note that the Birch glacier was gaining mass in recent years, as ETH’s Dr. Huss explained to the Luzerner Zeitung (see yesterday’s posting)]. Climate change is therefore the framework condition for mountain collapses like those in Switzerland, according to Beutel [is it? I mean…]:

To a certain extent, the journey [climate change™ is a journey, huhum, that’s a new one] has been booked for the next few years—it’s already heated up, and the thawing and melting will inevitably continue.

Thus the Professor of Computer Engineering [not climatology™] at the University of Innsbruck told the media on Thursday, adding:

Mountains become unstable and eventually collapse because the material configuration and geometry change. This means that the effect of gravity is the actual driving force [hahahahaha, gravity rules, then, and not so much ‘other stuff’? What a paraheretical comment].

[that, by the way, is where the ORF piece shifts gears and goes into full-grift mode by noting that, unlike Switzerland, there is not such monitoring system in place in Austria]

There is less of a risk for Austria than for Switzerland, although it cannot be ruled out. ‘We are not immune,’ says Beutel…

Incidentally, there is no nationwide permafrost monitoring system in Austria as there is in Switzerland. Glacier researcher Andrea Fischer also attests that Switzerland has a ‘much better developed measuring network for permafrost and mass movements’ [yep, that is the same glaciologist whose refereed studies show that the Alps were ice-free when Oetzi died: all those Bronze Age people and their CO2 emissions are surely to blame for that… my take is that Dr. Fischer might want the grant (grift) money involved in building up such a system]

…In an interview with the newspaper Le Nouvelliste and the Arcinfo platform on Friday, permafrost expert Christophe Lambiel from the University of Lausanne also expressed his conviction [that’s the key word here: note that there is no empirical evidence for that conviction] that the rockfall and the subsequent events are linked to climate change…

According to the expert, he knows of no other landslide in the Alps similar to the one in Blatten [I’ve never been to China, by the way, hence I cannot say anything about it until I’ve done some attribution studies]. The Birch Glacier, which was already flowing downwards rapidly [note that the expert™ just confirmed that the glacier was flowing downwards—now ask yourself: why, just why, would glaciers do so? Because they are not receding, i.e., the Birch glacier was growing], accelerated even more due to the rock load and finally collapsed, said the Lausanne professor. This was an unprecedented sequence [I thought that glaciers, when expanding, naturally flow downwards due to—gravity?].

However, an attribution study is necessary in order to be able to make a concrete statement as to whether the event in Blatten occurred as a result of the climate crisis [this is the key take-away here: assumptions and convictions aside, there is no evidence—and this is also why I spent so much time earlier on introducing you to the leading Attributionist™, Dr. Otto].

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Bottom Lines

Both above-related legacy media pieces drone on about what needs to be done to ‘combat the climate crisis’ and the like. I’ve spared us all these ianities.

In lieu of the conventional bottom lines, I shall quote at length from an email I received less than 30 minutes after yesterday’s posting went live (while I don’t know if there is a ‘big beautiful bill’ behind the Blatten disaster, it’s also impossible to rule out; I’ve added some emphases in the below text):

Aloha Epi from Maui,

After Maui was hit with field effect tech, we formed a small group of professionals and began watching to see if the tech applications are being applied across the planet. There are 47 other similar events so far. When the glacier event happened, I checked all available early data and wrote the following to our team in an email entitled "Another Build Back Better Stacked Sequence - Swiss village Blatten & Lonza river":

Aloha MCI Team,

About the May 28th glacier collapse in Switzerland, when I heard a geologist saying that the pyroclastic flows of the glacier looked like 911 again, well, for one, glaciers have an entirely different kind of flow than pyroclastic (explosive volcanic (hot) rock river flows. So it begins looking like a designer event pretty fast (almost totally natural looking of course). So Blatten may well be another odd highly attention getting "climate change" event with an odd stacked sequence that could portend similar events to come.

Story summary:

Here’s the stacked sequence:

1 - The trigger is that the mountain side above one of the glaciers above Blatten explodes off the face of the mountain. As the key event that broke the stillness and at a high remote location I didn't find eye witness video.

2 - The mountain side mass of rock hits and dislodges the glacier, which shatters like glass, breaks apart, and, as ice, gives the rocks a sled ride down the mountain.

3 - The glacial flow + rock flow descend down the mountain; scooping up into their massive flow additional rock, ice, and trees carved out of the mountain on the way down.

4 - The amassed glacial flow spills into and fills across the valley. It even fills high up the opposite side, and down the valley burying the village of Blatten under what at some points appears to be many hundreds of feet deep glacial rock/dirt/ice deposits. Except for a few homes, the village of Blatten becomes blatantly buried. (Odd that Blatten seems so close to "blatant" meaning offensively obvious [I don’t think that’s relevant or plausible]).

5 - Upstream of Blatten, the Lonza river flows down, encounters the gargantuan glacial dam filling the valley and Blatten, and quickly submerges the few Blatten homes not buried by the glacial flow.

6 - The massive glacial flow consists of trees, rocks, dirt, and glacial ice. Now at lower and warmer elevation, the ice within has begun to melt at the same time that the lake builds up depth and volume.

7 - At some point the melting ice within the dam lubricates the mud, and with the pressure of a large lake of water pushing it, the volume of water/mud could become the most massive mudslide the Swiss have ever seen.

8 - Villages below Batten are evacuating as I write, expecting some degree of dam bursting mudslide. Hopefully by the time you read this, the Lonza river will have carved a channel through the glacial dam, and can thus drain the lake as a slower, safer, more manageable catastrophe [I’m unsure, and it depends on how far down-valley you’d care to look—at the end of the valley, there’s the main artery connecting to the Simplon pass, which is one of the most important Alpine north-south crossings].

Lonza is a name for boys in Spanish, meaning "ready for battle." Hmmm, NATO just had 3 weeks of the largest military exercise simulation of battle ever, that was blatantly obvious war monger saber rattling with the budget spent for a 5 year war already. Reeks of the cultists once again [could be, esp. as it becomes ever-harder to rule out such things].

Excellent video for pics of the dam here, but not in English:

Aloha Blessings

PS: I went to bed and forgot an important clue. In my first semester of civil engineering, our exercises included calculating all aspects of moving mountains: things like blasting roads & holes in mountains, transporting or placing the debris fast and affordably, calculating and building dams, and techniques to work with the features of geology to expedite jobs, save money, and make money [I doubt that these things aren’t included in Swiss engineering curricula]. If I could have given a solution to my professor in which I enlarge a valley, build a dam, and excavate a mountain and remove the debris all in one fell swoop by using field effects to drop the mountain on top of a ice toboggan to remove it and that widens two valleys and builds a dam all at the same time, well, that's one easy A+. I would not have buried people and towns, I would have figured out an evacuation.

So Epi, look for stacked motives—were people in the valley holding out against modern expansion and development, was there a need to expand, were certain people murdered, were there suspicious events, communications, financings, exercises beforehand? [well, there’s a long and partially sordid history of people living in bigger centres ‘complaining’ every now and then about the ‘backward’ mountain-dwellers clinging to their time-honoured ways of life, esp. since it was the former who are asked to pay for the clean-up, damages]. Were there large purchases or odd investments lined up? [I don’t know, but the 15-minute-cities concept™ says the ‘peripheral’ areas are to be given back to Nature™] Were any upcoming court cases, especially prosecuting criminals, nixed with this event? [I dunno, but I’ll have a look] Will this event be used for new laws and policies that would not have a chance before? [see the 15-minute-cities comment before: you bet it will…] How does this benefit someone’s politics? [well, gov’t grows, experts™ become more powerful, and others will benefit (incl. academia)] And will this end up being the first of more similar events to come as was Maui? Looks like field effect tech for stacked goals same as Maui.

Now, I’ll probably update you on these developments before too long, and before I’ll conclude this posting (which is overly long), I’d like to leave you with a few more things to consider in this context:

Alps were Ice-Free around 3,350 Years Ago, According to the Peer-Reviewed Literature Published in 'Nature'

It was warmer back then, up until the Roman era, hence I shall point you towards a long read that systematises our knowledge about Roman-era, high-alpine mining sites identified, which raise significant questions about the entire CO2 emissions aspects of the climate crisis™:

As Alpine Glaciers Retreat, Evidence of Stone Age, Roman, and Mediaeval Use Emerges

There is plenty of evidence from Norway, too, by the way:

Where Once Glaciers Rested, Archaeologists Literally Stumble Across Artefacts

In short—there’s so much, much more to consider than the simple, if not outright simplistic, attribution of ‘it’s the climate crisis, stupid’, for which there would have to be data (which there isn’t).

So, stay frosty in regards cause(s) and effect(s), and before too long, we’ll look at the methodological underpinnings of ‘weather attribution’.