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The attribution question

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 813–816 (2016)Cite this article

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Understanding how the overall risks of extreme events are changing in a warming world requires both a thermodynamic perspective and an understanding of changes in the atmospheric circulation.

Whenever an extreme weather or climate-related event occurs, the extent to which human-induced climate change has played a role is routinely questioned. Increasingly, scientists are able to give robust quantitative answers. In 2012, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published the first of an annual series of special issues looking at how climate change may have affected the strength and likelihood of individual extreme events that took place during the previous year — with this first issue containing just six papers1. Since then the science of event attribution has developed rapidly, with an increasing number of research groups applying a wider range of methodologies (for example, ref. 2). The US National Academy of Sciences has recently completed a report into the issue, concluding that “in many cases, it is now often possible to make and defend quantitative statements about the extent to which human-induced climate change (or another causal factor, such as a specific mode of natural variability) has influenced either the magnitude or probability of occurrence of specific types of events or event classes”3.

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Figure 1: Simple chaotic Lorenz 1963 model with added forcing.
Figure 2: Return time plots for the maximum four-day precipitation average during May–Jun for the upper Elbe catchment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Friederike E. L. Otto and Myles R. Allen are at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK,

    Friederike E. L. Otto & Myles R. Allen

  2. Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Jonathan Eden are at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), PO Box 201, 3730 AE De Bilt, the Netherlands,

    Geert Jan van Oldenborgh & Jonathan Eden

  3. Peter A. Stott is at Climate Monitoring and Attribution, Met Office Hadley Centre, Fitzroy Road, Exeter EX1 3PB, UK,

    Peter A. Stott

  4. David J. Karoly is at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia, and,

    David J. Karoly

  5. Department of Physics, Myles R. Allen is also at Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PU, UK,

    Myles R. Allen

Authors
  1. Friederike E. L. Otto
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  2. Geert Jan van Oldenborgh
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  3. Jonathan Eden
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  4. Peter A. Stott
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  5. David J. Karoly
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  6. Myles R. Allen
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Correspondence to Friederike E. L. Otto.

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Otto, F., van Oldenborgh, G., Eden, J. et al. The attribution question. Nature Clim Change 6, 813–816 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3089

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