Last month, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its report Summary report of the sixth assessment report.
It showed that global temperatures are now 1.1℃ above pre-industrial levels. This warming has led to widespread and rapid global changes, including more frequent and intense weather extremes now affecting people and ecosystems around the world.
But when an extreme weather event hits, how sure can we be that it was made more likely by climate change? How do we know it wasn’t just some rare, naturally occurring event that could have happened anyway?
Fear & Wonder is a new podcast from The Conversation that takes you inside the UN’s time-defining climate report through the hearts and minds of the scientists who wrote it.
The show is hosted by Dr Joëlle Gergis – a climate scientist and IPCC lead author – and award-winning journalist Michael Green.
In this episode, we take a closer look at one of the most important shifts in public communication about climate change: attributing extreme weather events to climate change.
While we knew in the past that climate change made extreme weather events more likely, advances in climate models now enable scientists to determine the influence of natural and man-made factors on individual weather extremes.
We speak to climatologist Dr Friederike Otto about a rapid attribution study of a heat wave in Toulouse, France as it unfolded in 2019. We also hear from climatologist Professor David Karoly to help us understand how climate models really work, while Professor Tannecia Stephenson explains how global models are then used to develop regional climate change projections for the Caribbean island of Jamaica.
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Fear and Wonder is sponsored by the Climate Councilan independent, fact-based organization dedicated to climate science, impacts and solutions.
