In an October 14th opinion piece for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ The Equation, climate scientist Marc Alessi makes the case that we are fully aware that “fossil-fuel-driven climate change has fundamentally altered the climate system.” Why, then, do we keep reiterating the same justifications instead of moving beyond the obvious and well-proven. Alessi writes:
“Climate attribution science is a mature sub-field of climate science that has been tested and perfected over the last two decades. For example, extreme event attribution answers the question in many instances, “how much more intense was this extreme event due to fossil fuel-driven climate change?” Or, ‘how much more frequent will this extreme event become due to fossil fuel-driven climate change?’
Scientists have now published hundreds of attribution studies, many finding conclusive evidence that extreme heat and rainfall, tropical cyclone rainfall, and weather conditions that produce wildfires in the western U.S. are exacerbated by human-caused climate change.
Yet still, scientists, journalists, and media frequently ask after an extreme event, ‘did climate change contribute to this?’ The answer is yes.
Alessi argues for moving beyond the well-established conclusions and “begin all analyses of extreme weather events from the established physical reality that all events occur within a fossil fuel-altered climate system. We no longer need to question if each event was influenced by climate change.”
Read the opinion piece in full.