Nancy Retzlaff ¹ and Karsten Haustein ²
See also Karsten's assessment of heat period in Eastern Germany, and his old homepage at the Environmental Change Institute in Oxford.
Extreme weather event attribution and climate (science) communication
Extreme weather event attribution, also known as attribution science, is a relatively young sub-field of research in climate science that is aiming at establishing the link between human-induced global warming and hazardous weather events. The idea is to estimate the change in risk of any given extreme weather event due to anthropogenic climate change, e.g. how many more (or less) often we can expect certain heat episodes or droughts to occur. These probabilistic statements can be made in terms of changing risk or changing severity (how many more degrees warmer would the same event be under current climate conditions compared to pre-industrial times). We will introduce the concept and give some timely examples of recent extreme events in Europe and across the world.
With the associated attribution studies becoming more and more reliable, the interest of the media in reporting these results has notably increased, helping to raise awareness of the effects of climate change. Effects that are already playing out in front of our eyes rather than being a lingering abstract danger in the distant future. However, reporting the science and the facts alone isn't gonna solve the climate crisis as it clearly doesn't speak to anyone. We will discuss the issues associated with fact-based reporting (using the so-called deficit model) and why there is still plenty of doubt in the public mind about the gravity of the climate crisis. We draw from social and psychological sciences and highlight who the various actors are and how (climate) communication can be made more effective in light of the urgency of the problem.