We’re Getting Better at Knowing When Climate Change is to Blame, National Academies Report Says

Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

Scientists have gotten much better at parsing how severe events are linked to climate change, a long-awaited report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has found. 

The report was developed by 14 experts (including climatologists, meteorologists, and atmospheric scientists) and updates a 2016 report on the same subject. That report found that climate change was partly responsible for worsening heat waves, cold events, droughts, and heavy precipitation events, but that improvements to attribution science—a branch of climate science that aims to determine the extent to which individual extreme weather events are caused by climate change—were needed.

A decade later, the new report notes that advances in attribution science have allowed researchers to more effectively determine the link between climate change and specific weather events. In particular, improvements in observations of Earth systems, better satellite measurements, and longer observational records have “substantially increased our confidence” in attributing long-term changes in the frequency of extreme events to climate change, said Jim Hurrell, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University who was part of the panel that created the report, in a presentation about it. 

According to the report, confidence in attributing events to climate change is still highest for extreme heat and cold events, followed by heavy precipitation events and drought. The report notes that “significant advances” have been made in the science of attributing tropical cyclones, but that scientists still have low confidence in attributing specific hurricanes or typhoons to climate change. Similarly, due to the many drivers of wildfires, there is still low confidence in scientists’ ability to attribute specific wildfire events to climate change. 

“A human influence is now being clearly detected in several important categories of extremes,” Hurrell said.

Attribution studies, the new report notes, may help improve public understanding of climate change, support governments’ risk management and planning, and inform policymakers about the effects of climate change.

Climate Litigation

The report’s findings could also be used to bolster dozens of legal cases against energy companies being pursued by states, municipalities, tribes, and even individuals. These lawsuits claim that fossil fuel and energy companies are directly to blame for harms resulting from climate-related events such as heat waves, fires, and storms. One wrongful death case, for example, seeks damages from ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell, and other companies for their role in fueling an extreme heat wave in the Pacific Northwest in 2021 that killed more than 1,400 people. 

“A report with the kind of gravitas that the National Academies can bring will be a huge boost to the plaintiff’s cases,” Patrick Parenteau, an emeritus professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School, told POLITCO. 

Because the report may be useful for such lawsuits, its release has faced criticism from skeptics of anthropogenic climate change. Such opposition, which included records requests to collect scientists’ emails and efforts to discredit attribution science, pressured two people to leave the group producing the report, according to POLITICO.

On the day of the first meeting of the National Academies’ panel to assemble the new attribution report, Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, called the project an “institutionalized stealth advocacy in support of climate litigation.” 

The goal of such opposition is “to keep attribution science out of court,” Alice Hill, a former federal prosecutor who worked on climate policy in the Obama administration, told POLITICO. “And what is the ultimate reason for that? To shield the fossil fuel companies from liability.”

Advancing Attribution Science

The report’s authors write that further improvements to attribution science have “significant potential” to help researchers understand the economic, health, and other impacts of climate change-fueled extreme events. 

To further strengthen attribution science and its usefulness in mitigating the effects of extreme weather, the report suggests a range of actions are needed, including higher-resolution global climate models, more studies that apply multiple attribution science approaches to the same event, additional peer review of attribution studies, and improvements to the observational datasets underlying attribution science, especially in the Global South.

“Continuing to improve observing systems remains a priority, because attribution science ultimately depends on reliable observations,” Hurrell said. “There are still vast regions of the world that just have mostly inadequate data records.”

—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer

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