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Extreme events

The art of attribution

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 342–343 (2016)Cite this article

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A high-impact weather event that occurred at the end of a decade of weather extremes led to the emergence of extreme event attribution science. The challenge is now to move on to assessing the actual risks, rather than simply attributing meteorological variables to climate change.

The detection and attribution of long-term trends in observed records (mainly temperature) has been routinely carried out at least since the second IPCC report in 1995. But attributing individual extreme events was deemed impossible until later, when the theoretical possibility was first described3 and then applied to show that the likelihood of the European heatwave of 2003 was at least doubled due to human influence4. However, it took another paradigmatic event, the Russian heatwave of 2010, to push the scientific community to start scrutinizing the methodologies of analysis as well as the events themselves, and to realize the importance of defining events and framing the exact question that any study attempts to answer. It is not that obvious from a meteorological perspective why the 2010 Russian heatwave in particular is so famous, as there have since been many other extreme events around the globe that had impacts at least as high. It was, however, the first extreme weather event analysed in two extreme event attribution studies with apparently contradictory results. One study analysed the magnitude of the event and found no significant anthropogenic signal5, whereas another found that such a heatwave was five times more probable compared with pre-industrial times due to anthropogenic climate change6. Soon after, these views were reconciled when it was shown that these are two complementary aspects of an event7 and not mutually exclusive1. Coumou and Rahmstorf1 used this example, as well as the ostensibly large number of meteorological records being broken around the same time, to review the state of scientific knowledge in this field. They highlighted that heatwaves are no surprise in a warming world, and neither are floods and droughts; however, when aiming to go a step further and actually attribute an individual extreme event to a particular cause, the scientific community needs to tackle some challenges.

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Figure 1: Record-breaking extreme events, 2012–2015.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Friederike E. L. Otto is at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, OX1 3QY, Oxford, UK,

    Friederike E. L. Otto

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Correspondence to Friederike E. L. Otto.

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Otto, F. The art of attribution. Nature Clim Change 6, 342–343 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2971

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