Can attribution science link specific weather to human-caused climate disruption?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0166
A recent Physics Today Online News Pick cited the Wikipedia entry for the science of climate attribution, a term that appears likely to figure more and more in the civic wars about the planet’s climate.
‘Attribution of extreme events shortly after their occurrence,’ says the opening of a new report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, ‘stretches the current state-of-the-art of climate change assessment.’ The authors declare an intention to ‘help foster the growth of this science.’
Nature’s editors want to see it grow too. As reported last September , they advocate more explicit linking of weather to climate and propose that ‘attribution scientists’ could run ‘operational climate-attribution systems.’
At the Wall Street Journal online, attribution science will likely draw disdain and mockery from James Taranto, author of Best of the Web Today, who just last week offered ‘Hot enough for you? Apparently it is, if you’re a global warmist .’ For years, Taranto has flogged an old gag that works in various ways, all of them resembling this: Isn’t it funny that Al Gore gave a global-warming speech on an outlier of a really cold day?
From scientists, of course, the standard response to that sort of sarcasm had always been simple: Weather isn’t climate. Now Taranto is using that dictum himself concerning press discussions of possible links between extraordinarily hot weather and climate change. His recent piece aimed at an Associated Press story and at a Washington Post column by Eugene Robinson that began, ‘Still don’t believe in climate change? Then you’re either deep in denial or delirious from the heat.’ Taranto responds: ‘News flash: Summer is hot.’ But he stops to state a claim about his many years of gags founded on weather-climate conflation:
Seriously, though, when we point out cold weather to mock global warmists, we’re satirizing the sort of cherry-picking arguments that global warmists routinely put forth. When it’s hot in July, it’s global warming. When it’s cold in January, climate isn’t weather. You science-hating idiot.
Taranto and climate warriors on both sides now have a lot of climate-attribution news coverage to argue over. Concerning that new scientific study, the Post online headlined its article ‘Report: Global warming raises chance of events like Texas heat wave and warm British Novembers .’ The Post piece opened this way:
Last year brought a record heat wave to Texas, massive floods in Bangkok and an unusually warm November in England. How much has global warming boosted the chances of events like that?
Quite a lot in Texas and England, but apparently not at all in Bangkok, say new analyses released Tuesday.
The PBS NewsHour offered similar coverage . So did the New York Times, in an article headlined ‘Global warming makes heat waves more likely, study finds .’
A Times editorial on the same day began this way:
The recent heat wave that has fried much of the country, ruined crops and led to heat-related deaths has again raised the question of whether this and other extreme weather events can be attributed to human-induced climate change. The answer, increasingly, is a qualified yes.
Mainstream scientists have always been cautious about drawing a causal link between global warming and any specific weather event; the world has experienced calamitous heat waves, droughts, wildfires and floods throughout its history. But they also agree that without sustained efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, dangerous heat waves are very likely to become more common, as will prolonged droughts and coastal flooding.
Many politicians and a vocal minority of scientists dispute such predictions as alarmist. What they cannot dispute are the numbers. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the 11 years from 2001-11 rank among the 13 warmest globally since record-keeping began 132 years ago. The average temperature in the contiguous United States for the first six months of this year, the National Climatic Data Center reported on Monday, were the hottest recorded since 1895.
Alarmist predictions? It does have to be noted that the Times also recently offered a commentary by Timothy Egan centered on the Colorado fires and framing the issue in biblical terms.
‘It sounds biblical,’ Egan writes near the end, ‘but smart scientists have been predicting this very cycle.’ Then he invokes nothing less than the biblical story of Noah, the flood, and the foretold fire next time: For ‘those who are already familiar with the new face of nature,’ Egan declares, ‘no amount of posturing can wish away the fire this time.’
The editors heard him. They chose the headline ‘The fires this time.’
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.