Roger Pielke Jr;
Everyone knows that in recent years climate change has fueled floods, storms, and drought, making them much more common and intense. For instance, a 2023 Pew Research poll found that 84% of Americans believed that climate change had contributed to worsening floods, storms, or drought in their local communities.
The widespread public belief in climate change as a cause of the weather events that we experience and see on social media is nowadays conventional wisdom. It is a fact so obvious that it barely needs to be supported at all.
As renowned climate scientist Michael Mann explains, the detection of climate change is as simple as “turn on the television, read the newspaper or look out the window to see what is increasingly obvious to many.”
Given these apparently undeniable realities we might wonder why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) spends so much time and effort on assessing the science of the detection and attribution of changes in climate. Well, for the IPCC at least, science still matters.
Given widespread popular beliefs and media-friendly experts willing to cater to those beliefs, many are surprised, shocked even, to learn that the IPCC has arrived at conclusions on extreme events and climate change that are completely at odds with conventional wisdom and popular opinion.