As firefighters and other first responders battle an unprecedented summer of fires, floods, tornadoes and heat waves around the country, a group of Canadian scientists are asking why they're happening in the first place.
"May and June were record hot months in Canada and we've got the record wildfire season as well," said Nathan Gillett of Environment and Climate Change Canada. "Yes, it has been busy."
Twenty years ago, if you'd asked a scientist if climate change was linked to days of torrential rain or months of desiccating drought, you'd probably get an answer along the lines of "We can't say for sure but this event is consistent with the modelling." Since then, hundreds of attribution papers have been peer-reviewed and published. As well as Canada, governments including the United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands, South Korea, Japan and the United States are using attribution science.
"Once you've got the method in place and it's validated, you really just have to get the observations from that event and you can provide a result," said Gillett. "Our aim is to look at high-impact events that are in the news," she said. "There was an appetite in the public and the media for more information about what's really happening now."
But attribution science has more uses than just shaping public debate. Governments are using it inform their adaptation strategies. Financial institutions are using it to assess risk. It's come up in hundreds of court cases around the world attempting to attribute climate liability.Attribution science can only work where there's enough historical weather data to build an accurate climate model. That leaves out much of the global south, where some of the worst human impacts are occurring.
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