A few weeks ago I read the new book by Friedericke Otto, one of the pioneers of weather attribution science. It’s an important field, because it allows us to understand when weather incidents are related to climate change and when they’re not. There have always been big storms, droughts and extremes. It is easy for people to shrug off weather incidents as the way it has always been, and not notice the underlying trends.
The team at World Weather Attribution are able to model weather incidents with or without the influence of climate change, and judge whether or not global warming was a major contributing factor. A round-up of their various studies for 2024 shows that yes, the general trend is that climate change is making extreme weather more likely.
Weather being the highly complex phenomenon that it is, there are exceptions. Climate change had no discernible effect on the wildfires in Chile last year, though it made the wildfires in Brazil more likely. Some things are made less likely by climate change, such as the cold spell in Scandinavia. Sometimes its hard to tell one way or another, as with the extreme rainfall in Afghanistan and Iran.
As always with weather, everything is possible. What matters is the long term trends. Climate change tweaks the odds, making extremes more likely. And as Otto argues, if we can prove that an event is driven by climate change, and we know who is contributing the emissions that are changing the climate, then we can establish responsibility. That’s when attribution science moves from being a tool for understanding to a tool for climate justice, and it’s one of the reasons why we’re going to hear more about it in the years to come.
The Earthbound Report 