The European Union and the United Kingdom are setting up a new office to link extreme weather events to climate change as quickly as possible. The Extreme Event Attribution Office (EEAO) will be led by the UK Met Office in Exeter. Several European institutions are involved, including the German Weather Service and the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Following heat waves, heavy rainfall, droughts or storms, the office is expected to assess within days how much human-induced climate change supposedly contributed to the event. Two analyses a month are planned. The reports are intended for the media, policymakers, insurers, emergency services and the legal sector.
The speed of the response is no minor detail. The findings – or, more accurately, interpretations – are meant to appear in the media while flooded streets, burning forests and destroyed homes still dominate news coverage.
In shaping public opinion, the first explanation offered by “experts” is often more influential than any subsequent examination of whether it was valid at all. Two distinct concepts are being deliberately conflated to steer the public toward a particular interpretation.
Weather describes the state of the atmosphere at a particular place and time. Climate describes long-term statistical patterns. A single storm, hot day or flood is still just a weather event. Whether such events are changing over time can be determined only from long-term data, certainly not within hours or days.
Yet the new office promises precisely that shortcut. Instead of gathering evidence over many years, it intends to produce a striking figure only days after an event. The news cycle, after all, does not wait for the slow accumulation of scientific evidence.
The Parallel World Inside the Computer
The method used to produce these figures is equally contentious. So-called attribution studies compare observed reality with a counterfactual world simulated on a computer. One model simulates the weather under present-day conditions. A second attempts to recreate conditions without the supposed effects of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions.
Researchers then examine how frequently a particular temperature, level of rainfall or wind speed occurs in each simulation. The comparison is used to claim that climate change made an event twice, 10 times or even 40 times more likely.
Such figures are ideal for instant headlines. They carry an air of precision because they are presented as the product of expert calculation, even though the counterfactual scenario used for comparison exists only inside a computer. No one can observe or truly know what the weather would have been at the same place on the same day without historical warming.
Nor is it certain that the same event would simply have occurred with slightly less intensity. Weather is a chaotic system. Small changes in initial conditions can produce different air currents, cloud formations and storm tracks. In the modeled counterfactual world, the rain might have fallen elsewhere or an entirely different storm might have developed.
The result also depends on the models selected and the assumptions built into them. Sea temperatures, soil moisture, aerosols, air pollution, irrigation and land use are all weighted differently.
In the case of flooding, further factors include paved surfaces, straightened rivers, the loss of natural flood-retention areas and the condition of flood defenses. No scientific team can assign universally reliable or verifiable weight to all these factors.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) therefore points out that climate change cannot be unequivocally identified as the cause of an individual weather event. Attribution studies calculate probabilities within a predetermined modeling framework. They do not prove what would actually have happened in another world.
Nevertheless, the new office intends to publish its reports within days. That leaves little time for independent peer review. Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, has therefore criticized the approach for putting “speed before accuracy”. For the EEAO, however, that speed is precisely the point: it allows the office to dominate the news cycle.
Political Use Is Built In
Attribution researchers make no secret of their ambitions. Their analyses are designed to reach the news cycle while public debate is still under way. Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution, told Kinfolk magazine that scientific evidence should be provided “as soon as possible – ideally within days”, before public attention moves on.
The new office is therefore designed to do more than conduct research. It sacrifices scientific standards while seeking to preserve the appearance of scientific authority.
From the outset, its findings are intended to inform political decisions and be used in insurance disputes and legal proceedings. Copernicus expressly lists lawyers alongside public authorities among its target audiences.
This opens up a vast range of potential applications. Attribution figures can be used in proceedings against governments or companies to link emissions to specific damage and build a case for alleged liability for weather-related disasters. Lawyers involved in climate litigation already regard the method as a tool for pursuing liability and damages claims.
The project is accordingly backed by well-funded networks. World Weather Attribution receives support from organizations including the European Climate Foundation and the Bezos Earth Fund. The latter provided $10m to advance and publicize extreme-weather attribution. Funding is therefore directed not only toward developing the method but also toward promoting it through the media.
The political advantage is obvious. After a flood, attention quickly shifts to global emissions. Questions about development, paved surfaces, warning systems or neglected flood defenses receive less scrutiny.
In the case of wildfires, forest management, firefighting capacity and arson can more easily fade from view. A global cause is extremely convenient for local officials. It is broad enough to dominate any press conference and remote enough to spare anyone on the ground from immediate responsibility.
The Extreme Event Attribution Office will now institutionalize this interpretation. The weather provides the images, the model produces the percentage and the office delivers the message while the cameras are still rolling and the public is still watching.