World Weather Attribution was founded in 2014 to produce research linking extreme weather events to climate change. That research is then funneled to mainstream media outlets, giving them what the group calls the “larger global warming context” as they cover natural disasters.
The group found a friend in Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who in 2022 announced a $10 million grant to WWA and two other organizations to “scale effective communication on the links between climate change and extreme weather.” The Bezos Earth Fund said the money would provide the WWA an outlet to “reach the most important audience segments via trusted messengers.”
One such messenger is Bezos’s newspaper, the Washington Post, which has cited WWA research in more than 70 stories over the past three years, a Washington Free Beacon review found. It does so uncritically, publishing the group’s non-peer-reviewed findings to suggest that climate change is to blame for recent natural disasters, including Hurricane Milton. Nonpartisan experts in the field, however, are not so sure of WWA’s methods, portraying the group’s flashy studies as rushed, partisan, and “incomplete.”
Bezos’s funding for the group, paired with the Washington Post‘s favorable coverage of its research, raises questions about the newspaper’s declared independence from its billionaire owner. The Post’s stories citing WWA do not acknowledge that Bezos—who purchased the paper in 2013, one year before the group’s founding—also bankrolls WWA.
“The motivation is entirely political,” Ryan Maue, the former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said of the climate group. “I’m not sure what the scientific community’s opinion on it is, but my guess is that it has gotten along this far because of its political weight and the media attention that it is given, meaning you don’t want to be on the wrong side of this.”
Maue particularly criticized WWA’s methodology, which consists of determining the probability of a recent extreme weather event, comparing it with the probability of a similar event that occurred decades ago, and attributing the difference to climate change. That leads to flashy findings—but not necessarily accurate ones, according to Maue, who argued that the WWA values speed over accuracy and, as such, produces “incomplete” research.
“What they are able to put out is the headline that climate change made Hurricane Helene worse and then count on the scientific illiteracy of the corporate media in order to produce headlines that become, you know, more and more outlandish, making claims that obviously are not supported by the science,” he told the Free Beacon.
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