Nature’s editors advocate more explicit linking of weather to climate

For years, Wall Street Journal online columnist James 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 has always been simple: Weather isn’t climate.

This week the editors of Nature are calling for something more complex. Their editorial works in tandem with the news feature “Climate and weather: Extreme measures ” which appears with the subhead “Can violent hurricanes, floods and droughts be pinned on climate change? Scientists are beginning to say yes.”

“Reluctance has started to fade,” the news feature says, when it comes to linking specific weather events to climate change. It quotes Gavin Schmidt, identified as a NASA climate researcher, but who is also one of the leaders at RealClimate.org, the fiercely proconsensus blog staffed by eminent climatologist.

“My thinking has evolved,” says Schmidt. According to him, ‘attribution of extremes is hard—but it is not impossible’ because of advances in statistical tools, climate models and computer power.

The news feature reports that US and UK researchers ‘have formed a loose coalition” called ACE, Attribution of Climate-related Events, “and have begun a series of coordinated studies designed to lay the foundations for a systematic weather-attribution” program. ACE reportedly hopes for an international system to “assess the changing climate’s influence on weather events almost as soon as they happen or even before they hit, with results being announced on the nightly weather reports.” The goal “is to carry out ‘fractional attribution’ of extreme events, estimating how much each one was influenced by anthropogenic greenhouse warming and how much by natural cycles.”

The feature points out that “the frequency of multibillion-dollar weather disasters has at least doubled since 1980" and suggests that insurance companies, civil engineers and communities could use better information about causes. There’s also this: “Reliable attribution of extreme weather events is also important for the public’s understanding of climate change, and to their willingness to support measures to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.”

Building on the news feature, Nature‘s editorial , ‘Heavy Weather,’ begins by questioning scientists’ usual response to the weather-climate question ‘is this a consequence of climate change?’

“An attribution system with ample resources, running in near real time,” the editors declare, “could prevent scientists’ answers ... seeming either too cautious or too alarmist and speculative.” It would prevent the public from conceiving of climatology as arcane, academic and unverifiable, they say, and “would be a good way to seed greater acceptance of climate scientists’ actual services to society and the problem of climate change.”

The editors spend a paragraph near the end stipulating the obvious limitations involving models, statistics and empirical data. They note that ‘not even the most thorough study can work out with absolute confidence the exact fingerprint of global warming in a given weather event.” They end with this: ‘If the exercise can prevent people from building houses along the most vulnerable coastlines, it will be worth the effort.”

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. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the media.’ 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.