In his new paper, statistician William M Briggs surveys the field of climate attribution studies, in which changes in the weather are blamed on humankind. In particular, he looks at the recent pronouncements on that subject by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its Sixth Assessment Report.
Briggs conclusion is that climate scientists are far too confident in their conclusions:
“There are multiple layers of uncertainty. There is the uncertainty in the events themselves, the uncertainty that arises out of the fact that the climate models used in these studies are imperfect, the uncertainty that arises from the statistical models used to reach the final conclusions, and finally the fact that any correlations between models and reality are weak and inconclusive.
Professor Briggs’ paper is entitled How the IPCC Sees What Isn’t There, and its publication coincides with the release of another GWPF paper, about the attribution methodology known as “optimal fingerprinting”. GWPF hopes that these two papers will start a serious debate on the reliability of climate attribution studies.
Download the report here.
