These approaches are still the subject of ongoing development, so the report has two recommendations: researchers should be very transparent about the uncertainties in what they’re doing, and they should develop tools to make these analyses useful for disaster preparedness. Knowing that a new weather extreme is possible is far less useful than knowing what aspects of the extreme pose the highest risks.
Normal science
Beyond the specifics of the report, the biggest takeaway is that this is normal science. Researchers have done a lot of work to explore one scientific question, and other researchers are taking the resulting knowledge and tools and applying them to new questions. There are some cases where that has been immediately effective, but there are plenty of others where there’s still considerable work to do.
At that level, it’s difficult to see why anybody would even find this report notable beyond its top-line conclusions about where we’re most confident. It’s even more difficult to see why preparing the report would cause political operatives to launch a FOIA campaign against those authors who happen to work at public universities, as described in the Politico report mentioned above.
The reason the report has stirred up controversy ahead of its release is that the fossil fuel industry views it as a threat. The industry has faced a large number of lawsuits accusing it of everything from fraudulently misleading the public to being responsible for financial damages from weather events. It’s those latter suits that make this report a threat. By presenting attribution as normal science that we’re increasingly confident in, it raises the prospect that courts will allow the scientific evidence developed by the field to be used as evidence in the courtroom.
The situation has been made worse by the fact that the National Academies were already involved in a political fight over the use of climate science in the courtroom. State officials had demanded that the report it prepared on the use of science by judges have a chapter on climate change deleted. The academies have refused, leading to the threats against their funding mentioned above.
Regardless of those threats, the report has now been released. It may take a few years to see whether the fossil fuel industry’s fears are realized in courtrooms, but it’s safe to expect that we’ll see attacks on the science detailed here in the meantime.
