Can attribution science link the heat wave to human-caused climate disruption?: Part 2
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0165
As discussed recently in this venue, the weather-climate attribution question has been drawing attention from both scientists and journalists. An 11 July New York Times editorial had begun:
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.
A qualified yes? Now an 18 July Washington Post editorial begins with a qualified no: ‘Can you blame the scorching weather on climate change? Not really. Or at least not yet.’
On the previous day, the Post‘s front-page, top-right headline had said, ‘Drought is worst in half a century.’ Online, Brad Plumer in Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog joined the Times‘s editors: ‘So is this a glimpse at our hotter, drier future? It appears so.’ But the Post‘s editorial’s online version carried the headline ‘Not so fast on blaming global warming,’ almost as if addressing the Timeseditors.
The headline in the Post‘s paper version telegraphed the editorial’s on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand text: ‘Climate change: What you can and can’t say.’ The editors assert, ‘Anyone who, in the midst of a hurricane here or a heat wave there, simplistically blames greenhouse gas emissions is wrong. But it’s also wrong to blame all extreme events on forces beyond human control.’
Both editorials acknowledge the uncertainties. Nevertheless the Times‘s editorial ends with a sentence expressing certainty: ‘The heat wave is merely the latest of many weather-related messages that should be easy to read.’ The Post‘s editorial ends by mixing certainty about the existence of human-caused climate disruption with confidence that attribution science remains unproven:
So, while the science of attribution improves, what can you say the next time you’re suffering through a sustained heat wave? That this is the sort of thing will get more common across a warming world. That should be more than enough to spur Americans to demand action from their leaders.
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.