Environment and Climate Change Canada says it's now able to publicly identify links between episodes of extreme heat and climate change within days of a weather event.The sun shines in an orange sky over Montreal during a period of extreme heat on May 12, 2020. Environment and Climate Change Canada says it's now able to publicly identify links between episodes of extreme heat and climate change within days of a weather event.
The science does not say whether climate change caused a specific weather event. Rather, it estimates the statistical likelihood of climate change causing a specific weather event and the degree to which it made the event worse. It also can indicate the opposite — that climate change did not play a significant role in a specific weather event.
Climate attribution science emerged in part from journalists' questions about the links between climate change and specific weather events — questions that climate scientists like Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia have been unable to answer conclusively. Climate scientists have changed their approach to such questions, he said, by looking for models that define the likelihood of climate change playing a role in a specific weather event.
"If we're able to provide those results days after an event rather than months or years, they're likely to be of more interest to people to help understand the impacts of climate change."Gillett contributed to the weather attribution analysis report published in December 2022 that concluded B.C.'s June 2021 heat dome "would be at least 150 times less common without human-induced climate change.