Extreme event attribution

[2][3] Attribution science aims to determine which such recent events can be explained by or linked to a warming atmosphere and are not simply due to natural variations.

[4] Attribution science was first mentioned in a 2011 "State of the Climate" published by the American Meteorological Society which stated that climate change is linked to six extreme weather events that were studied.

[5] German climatologist Friederike Otto posited that attribution science aims to answer the question, "did climate change play a role" in specific extreme events "within the news time frame – so within two weeks of the event".

[6] Attribution studies generally proceed in four steps: (1) measuring the magnitude and frequency of a given event based on observed data, (2) running computer models to compare with and verify observation data, (3) running the same models on a baseline "Earth" with no climate change, and (4) using statistics to analyze the differences between the second and third steps, thereby measuring the direct effect of climate change on the studied event.

[4] Attribution science may affect climate change litigation, perhaps by increasing lawsuits against companies for causing and governments for not addressing climate change.

The ability to determine the influence of global warming on a specific extreme event (vertical axis) depends on the level of scientific knowledge about how global warming affects that type of event. [ 1 ] More generally, this knowledge depends on the thoroughness of the records for each type of event, and on the quality of scientific models for simulating respective types of events. [ 1 ]
Climate Central applied a hurricane attribution framework from an Environmental Research: Climate paper to conclude that climate change's increase of water temperatures intensified peak wind speeds in all eleven 2024 Atlantic hurricanes. [ 7 ]
A house in Australia that was destroyed by wildfires