But attribution science doesn’t just tell us how climate change will affect weather. Otto wants to use her attribution report to help polluters explain the causes of extreme weather. “We started doing a lot of work with lawyers to bridge this knowledge gap between what can be said scientifically and what has been used as evidence,” she says. Due to ongoing litigation in Germany and Brazil, attributed science is moving to court.
Co-founded OTTO 2014 World Weather Attribution by oceanographer Heidi Cullen and climatologist Geert Jan van Oldenborg. Otto, who has degrees in physics and philosophy, initially believed that the primary role of weather attribution was to unravel the complexity of weather systems and quantify the extent to which climate change contributes to extreme weather. I was. Other scientists had used climate models to establish ways of attributing weather phenomena to climate change, but no one had attempted to use science to produce rapid reports on recent disasters. Neither was there.
World Weather Attribution’s first real-time survey was published in July 2015. The likelihood of a heat wave in Europe earlier in the month was almost certainly increased by the effects of climate change, the study found. Other studies of floods, storms and rainfall followed, each published within weeks of the disaster. But attribution research goes beyond understanding past events to help prepare for the future, says Otto. “We see attribution as a tool that can help disentangle the causes of disasters and use extreme events as a social lens to see where we are vulnerable.”
Pakistan’s devastating 2022 monsoon season is one example. Otto and her colleagues struggled with the wording of the report. This is because the model struggled to accurately simulate extreme rainfall because there were few similar events in the past record.They knew that precipitation in the area was much more intense than before, but they were unable to put a firm figure that the increase was due to climate change. maybe, but it’s [the role of] Climate change is much smaller,” says Otto. Although it was unable to determine the cause, the report highlighted that the proximity of farms and homes to floodplains, poor river management systems and poverty were the main risk factors, suggesting that Pakistan It highlights how vulnerable it is to severe flooding. “Vulnerability is what basically makes the difference between a non-impacting event and a catastrophe,” he says Otto.
A World Weather Attribution study tends to make headlines when it concludes that climate change increases the likelihood of extreme weather, but the opposite result could be even more helpful for regions facing disasters. . A study of prolonged drought in southern Madagascar found no significant increase in the likelihood of reduced precipitation due to human-induced climate change. Knowing this, says Otto, the country can regain its agency. “If we think that everything has to do with climate change, nothing can be done unless the international community comes together. That means that everything you do to mitigate vulnerability really makes a big difference.
Photo: Maria Lux
not only Governments that are very interested in the results of imputed studies. Courts are starting to pay attention, too. In August 2021, an Australian court ruled in a lawsuit filed by bushfire survivors that the New South Wales Department of Environmental Protection had failed to meet its obligations to protect the environment from climate change. One of Otto’s attribution studies for the 2019-20 wildfire season was used in a court-commissioned report, but after the judgment was pronounced, one of the lawyers involved in the case said she Only when I emailed her did she find out about it. “It’s really cool when the research we do has real-world impact,” she says.
If attribution studies can show that climate change has made disasters more severe, they also show something else. It’s about who might be held responsible. Californian geographer Richard Heed has spent decades delving into archives to estimate the carbon footprint of companies going back to pre-industrial times. The result is known as the Carbon Majors, the world’s largest polluter database to date. His 2017 Carbon Majors report found that half of all industrial emissions since 1988 come from just 25 companies or state-owned entities. Saudi Aramco alone, a state-owned fossil fuel company, accounted for his 4.5% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions between 1988 and 2015.
