Attribution and Extreme Events
/Question #002:
A company executive wants to anchor an internal climate risk briefing to a recent hurricane that hit one of the organization's facilities with record-breaking storm surge. The executive asks the Climate Change Officer to help with language that frames the event as evidence of climate change.
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There is long historical context to hurricanes happening well before anthropogenic climate change. But in the past few decades, climate change has measurably increased the conditions that make those storm events strengthen more suddenly and cause more devastation than in years past:
- Warmer oceans fuel that intensification and drive higher wind speeds;
- Higher atmospheric moisture has intensified rainfall; and
- Sea level rise has amplified storm surges.
Attribution science can now quantify how much more likely or how much more severe specific event characteristics were made by climate change.
Option A overstates the science by treating the storm as caused by climate change. Option B understates it by treating attribution as off-limits, a position that no longer reflects where the science is.
A CC-P® names what climate change actually did: it shifted the probabilities and intensities of the conditions producing the event. That language prepares the executive to discuss organizational risk in terms grounded in current attribution science, not in over-claims or outdated caution.