Even by Con standards, this fact-free article by ‘climate justice’ academics, Michael Mikulewicz and Tahseen Jafry, at Glasgow University, is outrageously bad. The title alone is enough to make you blanche:

Cyclone Idai: rich countries are to blame for disasters like this – here’s how they can make amends

Presumably, the making amends for causing poor black people in southern Africa to suffer a CO2-induced super storm equates to ‘climate justice’ in the addled brains of these left wing progressive academics.

In an attempt to explain the logic of their bold title claim, they say:

It is inevitable that people will connect Idai and climate change. It is always tricky to establish a direct causal link, but thanks to the evidence provided by a number of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), including this most recent one from October 2018, we know that climate change is bound to increase the intensity and frequency of storms like Idai. At the very least, this crisis is a harbinger of what is coming.

Their second reference is IPCC SR15. Here is what SR15 says about tropical cyclones:

Numerous studies leading up to and after AR5 have reported a decreasing trend in the global number of tropical cyclones and/or the globally accumulated cyclonic energy (Emanuel, 2005; Elsner et al., 2008; Knutson et al., 2010; Holland and Bruyère, 2014; Klotzbach and Landsea, 2015; Walsh et al., 2016). A theoretical physical basis for such a decrease to occur under global warming was recently provided by Kang and Elsner (2015). However, using a relatively short (20 year) and relatively homogeneous remotely sensed record, Klotzbach (2006) reported no significant trends in global cyclonic activity, consistent with more recent findings of Holland and Bruyère (2014). Such contradictions, in combination with the fact that the almost four-decade-long period of remotely sensed observations remains relatively short to distinguish anthropogenically induced trends from decadal and multi-decadal variability, implies that there is only low confidence regarding changes in global tropical cyclone numbers under global warming over the last four decades.

Moreover, studies that have used more homogeneous records, but were consequently limited to rather short periods of 20 to 25 years, have reported no statistically significant trends or decreases in the global number of these systems (Kamahori et al., 2006; Klotzbach and Landsea, 2015). Likewise, CMIP5 model simulations of the historical period have not produced anthropogenically induced trends in very intense tropical cyclones (Bender et al., 2010; Knutson et al., 2010, 2013; Camargo, 2013; Christensen et al., 2013), consistent with the findings of Klotzbach and Landsea (2015). There is consequently low confidence in the conclusion that the number of very intense cyclones is increasing globally. General circulation model (GCM) projections of the changing attributes of tropical cyclones under high levels of greenhouse gas forcing (3°C to 4°C of global warming) consistently indicate decreases in the global number of tropical cyclones (Knutson et al., 2010, 2015; Sugi and Yoshimura, 2012; Christensen et al., 2013; Yoshida et al., 2017).

That is about as opposite as you can get to the authors’s fact-free claim that the intensity and frequency of tropical cyclones is bound to increase with climate change. The first irony is that it is sourced from the very reference they cite to supposedly justify their assertions about tropical cyclones and about Idai in particular. The second irony is that at the end of their article, the Con prints this:

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My head just exploded. If this is the Red Team in action, the press Blue Team set up under President Trump won’t have to overwork themselves. Turn up at 9am. Share a coffee. Have a good laugh. Rattle off an article or two to Fox News, the WaPo, etc., leave just after 10 or 11.

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