The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The audience for this magazine, in other words, is professional mathematicians and related researchers working in a wide variety of fields. While this article contains (just a few simple) equations, I wrote it to be understandable even if you skip over the math.
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Linking Extreme Weather to Climate Change
For SIAM News:
As the world’s climate changes, the warming atmosphere and oceans produce heavier rainfalls and more hurricanes, snowstorms, and other instances of extreme weather. Climate models predict the change in frequency of these events as a result of human-driven global warming. However, scientists and non-scientists alike are interested in whether climate change is responsible for specific weather events — such as Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.
“The kosher answer to this used to be that we can never say that climate change causes a specific event,” statistician Claudia Tebaldi of the University of Maryland’s Joint Global Change Research Institute said. “This has actually changed over time, because a few recent events were so extreme that the probability of observing them without climate change would have been practically zero.”
In other words, scientists and science communicators are growing increasingly confident about linking specific weather to global changes, a subfield of climate science and meteorology known as “event attribution.” Researchers calculate the probability of a particular event’s occurrence with or without climate change by considering a combination of factors, including human activity and variations that are independent of human contribution. Event attribution is a relatively recent discipline; scientists first used it to link climate change to the 2003 European heat wave [4], which killed thousands of people.
