Doing the detective work on climate change

Hello and welcome to the AP Climate Watch newsletter. I’m Douglas Glass , an editor for AP’s Climate and Environment team. Today, with an assist from longtime AP science writer Seth Borenstein , I’m going to tell you a little about how scientists work to quickly answer a question that almost always follows extreme weather these days: Did climate change play a part?

On April 15, heavy storms began battering the United Arab Emirates and didn’t let up before dumping nearly 6 inches of rain on Dubai, paralyzing the city’s airport in a record 24-hour deluge that was well above Dubai’s average for an entire year. At least two dozen people died in the UAE and neighboring Oman and Saudi Arabia.

Less than 10 days later, a team of scientists tied the unusual rainfall to climate change. Somewhere between 10% to 40% more rain fell than it would have without Earth’s atmospheric warming, they reported.

The snap analysis came from World Weather Attribution, a group that launched in 2015 largely due to frustration that it took so long to determine whether climate change was behind an extreme weather event.

“We think it’s not only important to provide that answer, but to provide that answer in a quick enough time frame that people get scientific evidence to support the answer while the event is still talked about in the media and in fresh memory,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and one of the group’s founders.

Their work, called attribution science, uses real-world weather observations and computer modeling to arrive at probabilities that a particular event would have occurred before and after climate change, and whether its intensity was likely affected.

The goal is to help broaden the understanding of climate change so countries can better adapt to the impacts already being felt and, by reducing greenhouse gas emissions (the main driver of climate change), try to stop the effects from worsening.

News organizations, including The Associated Press, periodically use attribution science studies to be able to tell readers, in as close to real time as possible, what impact climate change may be having on any extreme weather event. As with any study, AP looks closely at the methodology and gets outside voices.

While the models that attribution science uses are gaining in both speed and sophistication, it is an evolution from scientific norms—which not all scientists agree with.

Science’s gold standard is peer review – not publishing until others can review your work. That’s not possible when the goal is a very fast turnaround. Otto’s team came up with other ways to ensure the integrity of their work, she said.

All the group’s data and modeling are available for anyone to review. Many of their reports are submitted to peer-reviewed journals after they are released; 25 have been published.

“That has allowed us to build up a huge body of scientific literature,” she said.

Since its first study in 2015, which concluded that a European heat wave was made more likely by climate change, World Weather Attribution has produced more than 60 reports. Some of its work was used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s top body of climate scientists, in a 2023 assessment that found human-caused climate change was intensifying weather extremes worldwide.

Some studies have not found that climate change increased the severity or likelihood of extreme weather.

AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein has covered climate change science for more than 25 years. For the first half of that, scientists couldn’t confidently draw connections from their research to the extreme weather affecting people. Now, attribution science can do it, and quickly. Borenstein said it’s changed everything. When politicians and policy makers talk about what they want to do or not do, journalists can use real-life examples of what has and hasn’t been connected to climate change to both fact-check them and explain to readers why it matters.

Otto’s team can study only a small fraction of the extreme weather that’s happening. She said they are trying to do more work in areas of the world that have fewer weather observations, and where attribution science has been little practiced. That was the case with the UAE study, which she called one of the hardest they had done.

“These studies, even though they are a bit more difficult to communicate, they are even more important for that” reason, she said.

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It’s been 10 years since the city of Flint, Michigan, made a fateful decision to begin drawing its drinking water from the Flint River. That set in motion a lead and bacteria public health crisis that the city still hasn’t recovered from. Children of the period have memories of warnings against drinking or cooking with tap water, washing from buckets filled with bottled water, and in some cases stomachaches, skin rashes and hair losses. But dozens of those children – now teenagers and young adults – have transformed their trauma into advocacy on a range of issues.

Thank you for reading this newsletter. We’ll be back next week. For questions, suggestions or ideas please email [email protected]

This newsletter was written by Doug Glass, an editor for climate and environment, and produced by climate engagement manager Natalia Gutiérrez.

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