Links tagged “droughts”

Extreme weather expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.: "I can’t get over how egregiously wrong this NYT article is. Vulnerability to weather extremes is currently lower than it has ever been - in rich and poor countries — ever! This is one of the most significant science, technology & policy success stories of the past century. The idea that 'no one is safe' (NYT) Is as much misinformation as anti-vaccine propaganda. People around the world have never in all of history been more safe in the face of weather and climate extremes."

Friederike Otto, a climate expert at the University of Oxford: ‘Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind." 

In fact, Otto herself has relied on climate attribution work to support climate lawsuits as a 2019 E&E News story mentions: “Friederike Otto, a climate expert at the University of Oxford and lead scientist at the World Weather Attribution project, said she talks ‘a lot with lawyers’ about how attribution science could be used as a litigation tool.” ... Otto also signed onto a motion in support of San Francisco and Oakland’s climate lawsuit and the E&E News article mentions that she works with Myles Allen, another climate academic at Oxford, who, the publication notes, “authored what is widely considered the first attribution study on the 2003 European heatwave,” and he wrote an op-ed that same year linking attribution science and lawsuits.

Dr. Matt Briggs points out that most attribution claims are based around comparing simulations of the climate today to simulations of the climate as it might have been without human activity. But as he explains, this approach has a fundamental problem: “We simply have little or no idea what the climate would have been without human activity. Moreover, we can’t ever know what it was like.” ... 

“In order to attribute individual weather events to humankind, scientists need a perfect model of the climate. They do not have this. Therefore, claims that we are responsible for any particular weather event are at best overconfident, if not plain wrong.”