Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change (2016) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 19-26
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From page 19... ...
A matter of growing inter est, however, is the degree to which humans are changing these risks through anthropogenic climate change. This concern has been driven by the growing impacts on ecosystems, communities, and infrastructure of recent extreme events across the United States and the world.
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From page 20... ...
Without climate change With climate change ure, Vulnerability, te Extremes, near constant more cold hot ts, and Disaster weather near constant weather more s extreme cold weather extreme hot weather extreme cold cold hot extreme hot Mean: of climate extremes and the potential without and with weather change result from the climate extremes Figure SPM.3 | The effect of and from the exposure and1.1 This probability density functionchanges in temperature distribution on FIGURE vulnerability extremes. Different changes in temperature distributions between present and events resulting from captures the likelihood of specified d natural systems.
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From page 21... ...
Each extreme event, however, has a host of possible natural and anthropogenic causes in addition to anthropogenic climate change. Examples of natural causes include large-scale circulation, internal modes of climate variability, and some aerosol effects (e.g., marine aerosol, stratospheric and volcanic aerosol)
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From page 22... ...
Some of the anticipated impacts can be reduced, however, through such management strategies as land use planning if the connections between climate change and extreme events like intense precipitation are better understood. Such planning would ideally be based on a broad risk assessment, including projections of future trends in extreme events, and it need not rely specifically on attribution of individual events.
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From page 23... ...
Because of advances in the relatively young science of extreme event attribution, however, it is now possible in some cases to provide quantitative information about how climate change may have impacted the probability or intensity of an individual event and to cast this within a probabilistic causal framework. In perhaps the first attempt at extreme event attribution, Stott and colleagues (2004)
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From page 24... ...
describe the degree of certainty about their findings and characterize the uncertainty. THIS STUDY AND THE COMMITTEE'S APPROACH This committee was asked to examine the science of attribution of extreme weather events to human-caused climate change and natural variability by reviewing current 3 In practice, not all attribution studies include statistical confidence.
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From page 25... ...
The committee has included a detailed discussion on the framing of extreme event attribution questions in Chapter 2 and offers guidance on communicating event attribution study results in Chapter 3. Although this report focuses almost exclusively on the physical aspects of the causes of extreme events, including the effect of anthropogenic climate change, it is important to acknowledge that significant human aspects (other than human-induced GHG emissions)
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From page 26... ...
Chapter 2 discusses the framing of event attribution questions. Chapter 3 discusses the challenges and uncertainties associated with the implementation of the different approaches to extreme event attribution.
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