#4 Extreme Event Attribution (EEA)
This week I spoke with Dr Chris Brierley, climatologist and lecturer at UCL. He said that if I was ever going to answer the question I asked two posts ago, “if we are changing the climate, are we similarly changing the weather?” I would have to explore the science of Extreme Event Attribution (EEA). So, here we go: In 2004, Dr. Stott and his colleagues at the UK Met Office published a paper in Nature proving that climate change had doubled the chances of the record-breaking 2003 European heat wave, killing many tens of thousands of lives. Stott et al., 2004: Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003 This marked the birth of EEA - developed to assess the level to which we as humans are influencing extreme events. The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) was set up, annually dedicating a special issue to the extreme event attribution studies that were carried out the previous year. It was sifting through these pub...