Attribution of weather in climate science

A 2023 SciAm article, When Disaster Strikes, Is Climate Change to Blame?, discusses the status of weather attribution in climate science. Climate attribution science is the science of attributing an extreme weather event to global warming. For decades, climate scientists could not attribute any specific weather event or series of unusual weather events to global warming, e.g., a major flood or a deadly heat wave. Computers were not powerful enough and existing models were not adequate for the job. 

Climate attribution science asks the precise question, to what extent did human‑caused climate change make a specific extreme event (or series of events) more likely or more intense than it would have been in a preindustrial climate. Using observations, statistics, and climate models, researchers compare our current, greenhouse‑gas‑laden world to a counterfactual one without human emissions, estimating, for example, that climate change made a wildfire twice as likely or a storm 10% wetter.

Over the past decade, this line of research has become a mature discipline with standardized methods and explicit uncertainty ranges. Confidence is highest for heat waves, where the human signal is strong and models are well‑tested; it is moderate for heavy rainfall and floods and still developing for some storm types. Multiple independent teams, using different models and datasets, now routinely converge on similar attribution results, which is the gold standard for scientific reliability. In short, attribution science is not infallible, but it is robust enough that major assessments and courts increasingly treat it as credible evidence.

The science politicized and attacked

Trump and MAGA elites are responding to the growing body of global warming evidence not by accepting and working with it, but by deflecting and attacking climate science generally. They erase real science from policy and replace that with fake science and lies. Trump still continues to call climate change a “hoax” or “con”. He attacks the science wherever he can. Top MAGA officials cynically and falsely describe carbon dioxide as “beneficial”, a debunked assertion, while misrepresenting climate science as a “religion”. MAGA-dominated federal agencies have floated or relied on reports full of cherry‑picking and debunked denial arguments to justify efforts to revoke EPA’s endangerment finding, even as overwhelming evidence links human emissions to worsening extremes. Analysts describe this as a shift from simple denial to institutionalized misrepresentation.

Apparently, simple global warming denial isn’t working very well any more. MAGA does not debate attribution studies or other mainstream climate science evidence. Instead the climate science deniers defund, censor, or replace real science knowledge with false partisan alternatives. MAGA politics has turned climate science denial into federal policy while people in the real world face increasingly intense climate disasters.

Denial

Deflection