Ladies and Gentleman, the USS Al Gore

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Scientists Can Now Blame Individual Natural Disasters on Climate Change

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It was January 2003, and as Allen—a climate expert at the University of Oxford—monitored the rising waters from the safety of his house, a voice on the radio was telling him that it couldn't be done. Sure, the flood was the type of event likely to be made more frequent by global warming, the representative of the United Kingdom's Met Office said on the show. But ascertaining anything more concrete was out of reach.

At the time, the Thames River Basin had seen some of its greatest rainfall in decades, and by early January, the flow in some parts of the river was the highest it had been since 1947.

But the radio voice added that it would be "impossible to attribute this particular event [floods in southern England] to past emissions of greenhouse gases," said Allen in a commentary published in Nature shortly thereafter.

In 2003, that was the predominant view in the scientific community: While climate change surely has a significant effect on the weather, there was no way to determine its exact influence on any individual event. There are just too many other factors affecting the weather, including all sorts of natural climate variations.

But Allen wasn't so sure.

"At the time, everybody was saying, 'Well, you can't attribute a single event to climate change,'" he said in an interview with E&E News. "And this prompted me to ask, 'Why not?'"

So he drafted his commentary as the floodwaters inched closer to his kitchen door. He wrote that it might not always be impossible to attribute extreme weather events to climate change—just "simply impossible at present, given our current state of understanding of the climate system." And if researchers were ever able to make that breakthrough, he mused, the science could potentially influence the public's ability to blame greenhouse gas emitters for the damages caused by climate-related events.

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His hunch held true. Nearly 15 years later, extreme event attribution not only is possible, but is one of the most rapidly expanding subfields of climate science.

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austintigerdad

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consensus is the opposite of science

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mere skepticism is frowned upon, contrarian evidence is blasphemy, all questions are stupid

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