On Aug. 29, when a typhoon feared to morph into “the biggest storm ever” made landfall and battered wide areas of Japan with wind gusts, torrential rain and high waves, a burning question was on the minds of many: Is this because of climate change?
An answer came surprisingly quickly.
A day later, while Typhoon Shanshan was still crawling through Japan having turned east in the Kyushu region, a team of scientists at Imperial College London declared that climate change had “supercharged” the typhoon.
Not only that, they pinpointed the role of climate change in numbers: Shanshan’s devastating winds were made 26% more likely and 7.5% more intense because of warming.
Such a rapid assessment from scientists on the influence of climate change on a particular weather event was unthinkable a little more than a decade ago.
Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute — Climate Change and the Environment who was not directly involved in the Typhoon Shanshan study by her colleagues, is a key person behind this drastic change in the climate science community.
In 2014, Otto co-founded World Weather Attribution (WWA), comprised of an international team of climate scientists, to expedite attempts to study the link between specific extreme weather events, be it heat waves, landslides, tropical storms or wildfires, and human-induced climate change — a field known as “event attribution.”
While the history of attribution science itself dates back to the 1990s, it used to take months or years for scientists to examine and publish the results of their analysis. WWA releases them days or weeks after the event — while the impacts of extreme weather are still fresh in the minds of the public and policymakers — so it can better inform discussions about climate change, the group says.
“One of the big problems with climate change and particularly with acting on climate change was that … while (the planet’s warming) is very clear and very straightforward, it’s not linked to people’s experiences, so it’s not something that they feel is important for their own life,” Otto says.
“The reason why we thought it’s really important to do these studies quickly and to develop the methodology that allows us to do that quickly is to be able to connect people’s experience with this relatively abstract science of climate change.”