Attribution Studies

Charlottesville

August 26, 2023

On my semi-annual quest to find answers.

"Attribution studies" are one's done to analyze the probability that climate change contributed to an "extreme" weather event. I think they might be a bad idea in terms of the "marketing of climate change."

Too often I hear an off-handed comment "it's so hot today, must be global warming." The trouble I have is that statement is linking a data point with a trend. Climate change is about much much more than a week if hot weather, an intense thunderstorm or a record hurricane. Those individual events are not "climate events" -- they are "weather events." Our sources of news do us a disservice by confusing the two -- just as much as they do when they deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

End of rant.