Tech

Climate enforcers need clear proof. Friederike Otto has it


But attribution science can do more than tell us how climate change affects the weather. Otto wants to use his attribution reports to hold polluters accountable for extreme weather events. “We started doing a lot of work with lawyers, basically bridging this knowledge gap between what we can scientifically say and what so far,” she said. is still used as evidence. With legal cases underway in Germany and Brazil, attribution science is making its way into the courtroom.

OTTO co-founder World Weather Attribution in 2014 with oceanographer Heidi Cullen and climatologist Geert Jan van Oldenborgh. At first, Otto – who holds degrees in physics and philosophy – thought that the main role of weather distribution was to untangle the complexity of weather systems in order to quantify how climate change affects the weather. hard. Other scientists have established how to use climate models to attribute weather events to climate change, but no one has tried to use this science to provide quick reports of near-disaster disasters. this.

World Weather Attribution’s first real-time study was published in July 2015. It found that a heatwave in Europe earlier that month was almost certainly more likely due to variability. climate. Other studies followed on floods, storms and rainfall, each published within weeks of the disaster. But attribution studies aren’t just about understanding past events—they can help prepare us for the future, says Otto. “I now see attribution as a tool that helps us untangle the causes of disasters and helps us use extreme events as a prism in society to see how vulnerable we are. where.”

Pakistan’s devastating 2022 monsoon season is an example of this. Otto and her colleagues struggled with the wording of their report, because there are so few similar events in the historical record that their models struggled to simulate extreme rainfall. correctly large. They know that rainfall in the region is much larger than in the past, but they can’t give a firm figure on how much of that increase is due to climate change. “Maybe it’s all climate change, but it could also be [the role of] climate change is much smaller,” said Otto. While the exact cause could not be pinpointed, the report highlighted Pakistan’s vulnerability to severe flooding, highlighting its proximity to farms and homes with flood plains, a system Poor river management and poverty are major risk factors. “Vulnerability is what makes the difference between an event that has essentially no impact or it is a disaster,” says Otto.

World Weather Attribution’s work tends to make headlines when it concludes that climate change makes extreme weather more likely, but the opposite outcome could be even more useful for regions that are experiencing climate change. face disaster. An investigation of prolonged drought in southern Madagascar found that the likelihood of low rainfall is not significantly increased by human-caused climate change. “Knowing this will bring opportunities for nations,” says Otto. “If you think it’s all about climate change, there’s nothing you can do unless the global community comes together. But if you know that climate change doesn’t really play a big role, or doesn’t play at all, that means that everything you do to reduce your vulnerability actually creates big difference.”

Photo: Maria Lax

NOT JUST Governments are extremely interested in the results of attribution studies. Courts are also starting to take notice. In August 2021, an Australian court ruled that the New South Wales Environmental Protection Agency had failed to fulfill its obligation to protect the environment from climate change, in a lawsuit filed by survivors released forest fire. One of Otto’s attribution studies of the 2019-2020 wildfire season was used in a court-mandated report, but she only discovered it when one of the attorneys involved in the case submitted email her after the verdict is announced. She said: “It’s great to see this as a study we’ve done that has real-world impact.

If attribution studies can tell us that a disaster has been made worse by climate change, they also point to something else: Who might be responsible. Richard Heede, a geographer from California, has spent decades studying archives to estimate the carbon emissions of companies from before the Industrial Revolution. The result is called Carbon Majors: the world’s largest database of polluters to date. The Carbon Specialization 2017 The report shows that half of industrial emissions since 1988 can be traced back to just 25 state-owned companies or organizations. State-owned fossil fuel company Saudi Aramco alone was responsible for 4.5% of the world’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions between 1988 and 2015.

news7g

News7g: Update the world's latest breaking news online of the day, breaking news, politics, society today, international mainstream news .Updated news 24/7: Entertainment, Sports...at the World everyday world. Hot news, images, video clips that are updated quickly and reliably

Related Articles

Back to top button