Record-shattering events spur advances in tying climate change to extreme weather

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https://www.science.org/content/article/record-shattering-events-spur-advances-in-tying-climate-change-to-extreme-weather

By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine. 

Excerpt: In June 2021, a jet stream charged with heat and chaotic energy from a nearby cyclonestalled over the Pacific Northwest. The mass of trapped air baked the already hot landscape below to a record 49.6°C. More than 1000 people died from heat exposure. Scientists quickly began working to figure out how much of the blame for the heat wave could be laid to global warming. ...the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative...ultimately issued a statement, finding the heat wave was “virtually impossible” without global warming. But...that statement masked plenty of doubts. ...new approaches promise to increase the field’s rigor and more precisely capture the relationship between climate change and extreme weather—even for events so extreme that there is no historical record for comparison. ...WWA no longer relies on a single climate model, says Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London; instead, it uses a suite of models to compare extreme events in preindustrial and greenhouse climates. The group has also standardized how it defines and categorizes an extreme event, a choice that’s critical when hunting for and tallying up similar events in the models.…

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