“You can’t attribute any specific weather event to climate change.” For years, that was the party line among meteorologists and climate scientists; while they were alarmed by global warming, they were also sensitive to the bafflingly complex and multicausal origins of events like hurricanes and droughts. But thanks to improved climate simulations, accumulating weather data, and more powerful computers, it’s now possible to model worlds with and without the greenhouse gases we’ve added to the atmosphere over the past 150 years. And that lets researchers conclude that specific weather events, such as the devastating bushfires in Australia, were—within certain upper and lower bounds—more likely and more damaging thanks to global temperature increases. For the March/April 2020 issue, Technology Review senior energy editor James Temple surveyed the work of a number of groups doing this work, including World Weather Attribution, co-led by University of Oxford professor Friederike Otto.
