Friederike Otto, Ragnhild Skeie, Jan Fuglestvedt, Terje Bertsen, and Myles Allen

World Weather Attribution, Nature Climate Change

Published date November 2, 2017

Assigning historic responsibility for extreme weather events

  • The team applied two different statistical methodologies to assign contributions of individual countries’ emissions to an extreme weather event, using the example of the Argentinian heatwave of 2013/14
  • A previously published attribution study found that anthropogenic climate change overall made the event approximately five times more likely
  • This new analysis shows that when accounting for all historic emissions from 1850 onwards large emitters like the U.S. and the EU made the event approximately 28% and 37%, respectively, more likely