The robust attribution of specific climatic impacts — such as crop losses or flood damage — to anthropogenic drivers of increased extreme weather might help inform societal responses to, and assignment of responsibility for, climate change and resultant loss and damages. However, such end to end attribution is challenging.
Daniel Mitchell from the University of Oxford, UK, and co-authors explicitly quantify the role of human activity in heat-related mortality during the 2003 European heatwave, analysing both the Europe-wide temperature response and localized responses over London and Paris.
They find that anthropogenic climate change increased the risk of heat-related mortality in central Paris and London by ∼70% and ∼20% respectively. Out of the additional summer deaths attributed to the heatwave event in Greater London and central Paris 64 (±3) deaths were attributable to anthropogenic climate change in London, and 506 (±51) in Paris. Such attribution procedures may one day become commonplace following climate related events such as floods and heatwaves.
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Brown, A. Heatwave mortality. Nature Clim Change 6, 821 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3117
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3117
