New Research Helps Attribute Specific Extreme Weather to Climate Change

Climate scientists have long been pressed to answer the question “did climate change cause this?” in the days following the most recent devastating weather event. A watershed report (pdf) released Thursday helps those scientists to more conclusively answer: “yes.”

The report, authored by the Washington, D.C.-based National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), outlines a system to determine which extreme weather events are caused by climate change and to what extent.

This new area of scientific research, called “extreme weather attribution,” is more definitively affirming a connection that many have long asserted and perhaps also helping to silence those deniers who claim that catastrophes such as Cyclone Winston are not caused by global warming.

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“Like the surgeon general’s 1964 report connecting smoking to lung cancer,” Heidi Cullen, chief scientist at Climate Central, wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times on Thursday, “the report from the National Academies connects global warming to the increased risk and severity of certain classes of extreme weather, including some heat waves, floods and drought.”

The question about how much climate change has caused specific weather events has been a hard one to answer, Cullen noted, partly because so many other factors—natural and human—influence the weather. It’s also proved difficult to pin down to what extent climate change is a factor in a single event, when the effects of global warming are so pervasive. The new report, however, offers scientists a definitive method with which to parse out the connections.