An official shift may just have occurred not only in news coverage of climate change, but the way that careful scientists  talk about it. Till now blaming specific storms on climate change has been frowned upon. And it still is, if one is speaking of an isolated event. But something very much like blaming global warming for what is happening today, right now, outside the window has just gotten endorsement on the cover of Nature. Its photo of a flooded European village has splashed across it, “THE HUMAN FACTOR.” Extreme rains in many regions, it tells the scientific community, is not merely consistent with what to expect from global warming,  but herald its arrival.

This is a good deal more immediate than saying, as people have for some time, that glaciers are shrinking and seas are rising due to the effects of greenhouse gases. This brings it home.

The news is in two papers published today. One, by a team based mainly in Canada, looks at broad statistics across the northern hemisphere and concludes not only that rising rates of extreme precipitation events can be pinned directly on changes in greenhouse gases, but that models on which researchers have relied for prediction have underestimated the effect. The team spells it out in its paper: this is “the first formal identification of a human contribution ot the observed intensification of extreme precipitation.”

The second, from a UK-dominated team, used a “multi-step, physically-based ‘probabilistic event attribution’ framework” to pick apart a stretch of intense flooding in England and Wales in late 2000, the worst since record keeping started in 1766. The conclusion: without greenhouse forcing those floods probably would not have occurred.

Many reporters leapt on the news. Here are some of the stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Scientists connect global warming to extreme rain; He writes, “Essentially, the computer runs show climate change is the only way to explain what’s happening.”
• NY Times – Justin Gillis: Heavy Rains Linked to Humans ;
• NPR – Richard Harris: Researchers Link Extreme Rains To Global Warming;
• Reuters – Gerard Wynn: Floods linked to manmade climate change: studies ;
• Guardian (UK) blog – George Monbiot:  Climate change and extreme flooding linked by new evidence ; Nice job dissecting the difference between labeling a change in the pattern of weather, and one particular storm, on climate change.
• Telegraph – Louise Gray: Floods caused by climate change ; This one pays attention only to the UK floods of 2000, with nothing for the perhaps more significant hemispheric analysis.
• NatureNews – Quirin Schiermeier : Increased flood risk linked to global warming ;
• AFP – Marlowe Hood: Increased flooding driven by climate change: study;
• National Geographic – Brian Handwerk: Extreme Storms and Floods Concretely Linked to Climate Change?
• Washington Post – Brian Vastag: Greenhouse gases led to increase in deluges, researchers say ;
• BBC – Richard Black: Climate change raises flood risk, researchers say; Note the difference between these last two heds. Small but important. The first one says it’s already done it. The second that the risk is getting higher, which is far more abstract, sounds like what we’ve read before, and less likely to hit a reader in the gut.
• USA Today – Doyle Rice: Study: Climate change linked to extreme rain;
• Scientific American – David Biello: Are Greenhouse Gases Uppng the Risks of Flooding, Too?

There are many more. This is enough to show that  the big, mainline outlets tend to agree this is important.

Grist for the Mill: Oxford University Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

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