Page - 131 - in Loss and Damage from Climate Change - Concepts, Methods and Policy Options

5 Attribution:HowIs ItRelevant forLoss… 131 Fig.5.5 SchematicillustrationoftheassessmentbytheNationalAcademyofSciencesof thestate of attribution science for different types of extremeweather events, both in terms of the general understandingof the impactofclimatechangeonthiskindofevents,andintermsof theattribution of specific extreme events to anthropogenic forcing. SourceNational Academies of Sciences, EngineeringandMedicine (2016) howevents aredefined,howattributionquestionsareasked, and themethodologies used (Dole et al. 2011;Rahmstorf andCoumou2011;Otto et al. 2012),whichhas led to somedisagreements between scientists about the strengthof evidencewhich they provide (Trenberth et al. 2015; Otto et al. 2016). This does not preclude the useof evidenceabout changing risks fromattribution studies, buthighlights aneed for research to explore how the sciencemight contribute to decision analyses (see chapter by Lopez et al. 2018; chapter byBotzen et al. 2018), potentially building on existing efforts to combine and translate sources of uncertainty into a common confidence language (StoneandHansen2016). AsGHGconcentrationsincrease,andtheEarthSystemadjuststothisperturbation to the energy balance, the signal from climate change will be strengthened, and therefore it is likely that theEarthwill experiencemore regionalchanges, andmore extreme events which show a detectable influence from anthropogenic emissions (e.g.Leeetal.2016;Frameetal.2017).Therapiddevelopments in thesciencealso suggestthattherewillbeacontinuedgrowthinavailableliterature,andnowthereare also increasing efforts to extend extreme event attribution studies beyond climatic variables toalsoconsider ecological andhydrological impacts (e.g.Marthewset al.