The implications of weather-attribution methodology, which pins individual extreme weather events to human-induced global warming, are vast. Are the floods of 2021 in western Germany, the New York City region, and China the result of climate change or simply variable weather patterns? The same question could be, and indeed has been, posed about the wildfires in the western US and Australia, as well as the tornados, heatwaves, droughts, and cold snaps that have afflicted planet Earth in the last decade. Believing that climate change is generally responsible for the ever more prevalent angry weather is one thing, but pinning it to specific storms and catastrophes, that is another – with a whole different set of implications. Of course, climate modelling and attribution research aren’t entirely new – and 39-year-old German physicist Friederike Otto, trained at the University of Potsdam and Free University Berlin, didn’t invent the science of “extreme event attribution,” as it is called in climate institutes around the world, including Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIC), where she started her career, and … Continue reading Angry Weather: Attribution Bolsters Climate Science