Droughts, heatwaves and floods: How to tell when climate change is to blame

Weather forecasters will soon provide instant assessments of global warming’s influence on extreme events.

NEWS FEATURE
Nature.com
International Journal of Science

Plants growing from the dried out riverbed of Elbe. In the background can be seen churches and buildings of Dresden

Europe’s 2018 heatwave: the partly dried-out Elbe riverbed in Dresden, Germany, on 9 July. Credit: Jens Meyer/AP/Shutterstock

The Northern Hemisphere is sweating through another unusually hot summer. Japan has declared its record temperatures a natural disaster

The Northern Hemisphere is sweating through another unusually hot summer. Japan has declared its record temperatures a natural disaster. Europe is baking under prolonged heat, with destructive wildfires in Greece and, unusually, the Arctic. And drought-fuelled wildfires are spreading in the western United States.

For Friederike Otto, a climate modeller at the University of Oxford, UK, the past week has been a frenzy, as journalists clamoured for her views on climate change’s role in the summer heat. “It’s been mad,” she says. The usual scientific response is that severe heatwaves will become more frequent because of global warming. But Otto and her colleagues wanted to answer a more particular question: how had climate change influenced this specific heatwave? After three days’ work with computer models, they announced on 27 July that their preliminary analysis for northern Europe suggests that climate change made the heatwave more than twice as likely to occur in many places.

“With these studies … we are able to quantify the effect of climate change, in a specific location at a specific time of year.”

Soon, journalists might be able to get this kind of quick-fire analysis routinely from weather agencies, rather than on an ad hoc basis from academics. READ MORE