Extreme event attribution

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In general, extreme event attribution, also known as attribution science, evaluates relative contributions of multiple causes of an event, and assigns statistical confidence to that evaluation. Most often, the term is applied to the science of identifying and quantifying the role that human-caused climate change plays in the frequency, intensity, duration, and impacts of individual extreme weather events. Attribution science aims to determine the degree to which such events can be explained by or linked to human-caused global warming, and are not simply due to random climate variability or natural weather patterns. Before the development of statistical methods enabling attribution science, the scientific consensus was that global climate trends could be attributed to human influence, but attribution of individual weather events was not thought possible. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) first mentioned attribution in its 1990 First Assessment Report, saying "it is virtually impossible to demonstrate a cause-effect relationship with high confidence from studies of a single variable". However, the IPCC noted that confidence in attribution increases as climate predictions are borne out by observed data, referring to the "fingerprint method" that identifies indicators unique to human-caused global warming. The IPCC's 2001 Synthesis Report reported that "detection and attribution studies... consistently find evidence for an anthropogenic signal in the climate record of the last 35 to 50 years" and that "most of these studies find that, over the last 50 years, the estimated rate and magnitude of warming due to increasing greenhouse gases alone are comparable with, or larger than, the observed warming". Fraction attributable risk (FAR) was first applied in a 2004 analysis of the 2003 European heatwave, providing a direct link between anthropogenic climate change and an individual extreme climate event. Attribution science was described in a 2011 State of the Climate publication by the American Meteorological Society which concluded that human-caused climate change had a role in five of six extreme weather events studied. The greater computing power of the 2000s allowed weather to be simulated over and over again, and conceptual breakthroughs in the early to mid 2010s enabled attribution science.