But the Climate Shift Index is less about illustrating the full picture of how warming affected the most extreme events than showing if climate played a part at all. “These are the conditions that your kids or your grandkids might not experience,” says Pershing.Ĭlimate change can certainly make some unusual weather more than five times more likely. The model can also show if climate change made an event less likely, like an unusually cool day in the middle of the summer. For instance, models showed that atmospheric CO2 made Houston’s 105☏ heat five times more likely on July 10, the day of Arango’s forecast, the most extreme metric on the Climate Shift Index. The result shows if climate change made the day’s weather in different regions more likely, and by how much. Every day, an automated system compares the weather around the country with historical data and the output of 24 different climate models. Their work, led by Pershing, focuses on trying to show if and when climate change has an effect on everyday weather around the U.S. Climate Central’s effort is a bit different, though. So far, most of those efforts have centered on trying to prove the connection between the most extreme weather and climate change, like the blistering heat dome that settled over the Pacific Northwest last year, which scientists showed would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change. Such analysis for weather events like extreme precipitation is still fairly taxing, but scientists have gotten to the point where they can do the fairly straightforward calculations to look for a climate signature in extreme heat events in a matter of days. In the years that followed, scientists gradually proved out those techniques and developed ways to conduct the work faster, with the aim of showing the way that climate change made weather events more likely before they dropped out of the public consciousness. The first efforts towards that aim began back in 2003, when scientists started looking into how they could show if climate change caused a deadly heatwave in Europe that year-but it took a full year before the results were published. The hope is that if people see how climate change is already affecting the weather, they will better understand the urgency of the crisis and push their leaders to take the action we need to maintain livable temperatures in the decades ahead. The consequence is that American weather forecasts can feel as if any mention of climate change has been censored, with meteorologists talking about extreme, record-breaking temperatures without bringing up the long-term trends behind it. Long term trends are clear in many areas-milder winters and more scorching days during the summer-but no one was necessarily running the calculations to show how the rising concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere may be affecting the weather on any given day. Historically, TV meteorologists have been wary about talking on air about how daily weather is connected to climate change, in large part because they want to stay on solid scientific ground. “The temperatures we’re experiencing today are five times more likely climate change,” she said on a TV forecast earlier this month. Lena Arango, a local meteorologist at FOX26, wanted her viewers to understand why. Houston, Texas, is experiencing its hottest summer on record, with sizzling stretches of triple digit days and rolling blackouts caused by extreme power demand.
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