Just a couple of decades ago, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) argued that individual weather events could not be attributed to climate change. The science has since evolved, albeit with all its attendant uncertainties, and now we regularly hear of researchers having been able to attribute some individual extreme events to climate change.
Many scientific and data challenges persist in this exercise even as its outcomes are argued to be usable for estimating richer countries’ historic liability of climate-related ‘loss and damage’ and the legal liability of governments and corporations in precipitating adverse events like floods and droughts. However, researchers have used a variety of methods to evaluate attributability, which raises questions about whether attribution science is mature enough to be used in courts and multilateral fora.
