On 19th July 2022, the UK experienced the weather to come. The temperature reached 40.3 degrees Celsius, which he beat the previous record by more than 1.5 degrees.
Fires have destroyed dozens of homes in east London, and the heat has pushed power grids to the point of failure in other parts of the country. The National Bureau of Statistics estimates that the 2022 summer heat wave killed more than 2,800 people over the age of 65, making it the worst year for a heat wave since 2003.
Before the temperature peaked, Friederike Otto was in his office at Imperial College London, preparing to answer the countless questions that would be asked over the next week.
When extreme weather events occur, Otto and her small team of climate scientists (mostly working in their spare time) will learn whether climate change has made the weather more severe, or more likely. These are the people the world looks up to because “It’s important to have a more realistic picture of what climate change means,” said Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Climate Change Institute and co-founder of the World Weather Attribution initiative. I think,” he said. “Climate change is a real game changer for certain events like heatwaves, and we’re seeing events we’ve never seen before.”
Each week, Red Cross officials send Otto and her colleagues at the Global Weather Attributes a list of floods, heatwaves, and other extreme weather events around the world. Emails often list six or eight crises, too many for Otto’s small team to deal with, so the scientists target them to affect millions of people. Narrow down the weather giving, from storms in Europe to floods in Pakistan.
Once scientists have chosen their analyses, they can delve into the historical record, run climate models, and act quickly to elucidate the role, if any, of climate change in the disaster. Final reports are typically issued within days or weeks of the extreme weather event. This is very different from the normal pace of scholarly publishing, where scientific papers can take years to finally appear in a journal, but the point of World Weather Attribution is quick answers. By publishing research while extreme events still dominate headlines and the political agenda, scientists fill a void that could otherwise be occupied by climate change denial. For the heatwave, World Weather Attribution was ready to report just nine days after temperatures peaked.
The findings reveal the unprecedented scale of record-breaking temperatures. Otto’s team estimated that climate change would make heatwaves in the UK at least 10 times more likely, with maximum temperatures about 2 degrees Celsius lower in the absence of global warming. The weather was so extraordinary that in a world without climate change, it would have been statistically impossible for him to reach such high temperatures at two of his three weather stations the scientist investigated. I guess. In the world of climate attribution science, this is close to the smoking gun. “People are always asking for numbers, and sometimes we can’t give them numbers that they’re happy with,” he says. But this time, Otto had no shortage of numbers to pass on to reporters calling.
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. Ongoing lawsuits in Germany and Brazil are moving attribution science to the courts.
Beginning of WWA
Otto co-founded World Weather Attribution in 2014 with oceanographer Heidi Cullen and climatologist Geert Jan van Oldenborgh. 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 have used climate models to establish ways of attributing weather phenomena to climate change, but no one has attempted to use science to produce rapid reports on recent disasters. bottom.
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.”
