6th grade science FAIL

That’s a wonderfully scientific statement for you, isn’t it? We can’t think of anything else so it must be what we say it is, which just happens to be man-made CO2. A twelve-year-old physics student would be told off for writing something so unscientific in a laboratory experiment write-up, but climate scientists can get away with it.

As The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

A new study says greenhouse gas emissions have caused an increase in the intensity of floods.

Two Canadian scientists say that between 1951 and 1999 the intensity of extreme rains and floods increased by seven per cent in all of the northern hemisphere.

Published in the journal Nature, the research has found that the increase is twice what was predicted by climate modelling.

Dr Xuebin Zhang, a research scientist based at Environment Canada, said it was clear human activity had caused more intense weather.

“Our research provides the first scientific evidence that human-induced greenhouse gas increases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events,” Dr Zhang said in a statement.

Gosh, that sounds pretty conclusive. So let’s read further for the empirical evidence to make such a bold and sweeping conclusion:

Dr Francis Zwiers from the University of Victoria said the evidence led the researchers to a phenomenon that influenced precipitation on a global scale.

“The only thing we can think of is the changing composition of the atmosphere. Warmer air contains more moisture and leads to more extreme precipitation,” Dr Zwiers said. (source)

Right, there isn’t any evidence. then. Just a temporal relationship and a hunch? And the “only thing they can think of” is the changing atmospheric composition? Which just happens to have been all due to man? What if the warmer air were caused by natural, internal climate variation which may cause increased precipitation? Did they think of that, perhaps? No, I doubt it as well.