New federal program uses the growing field of attribution science to promptly establish to what extent a specific flood in British Columbia or wildfire in Quebec is caused by climate change.
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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.”Article content 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 has 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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