Even before floods peaked on the NSW Mid North Coast last week, the first scientific analysis linking the event to climate change hit the web.
ClimaMeter put out a rapid attribution study overnight on Thursday that found the NSW floods, especially around Taree, were significantly worsened by human-driven climate change.
An SES worker wades through waist-deep floodwaters. Credit: NSW SES
The group did the same within days of Cyclone Alfred in March and Cyclone Zelia in Western Australia in February, as well as a number of other extreme weather events around the world.
ClimaMeter, funded by the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), is one of the leading proponents internationally of rapid attribution studies, which seek to provide a more timely explanation of the link between specific extreme weather events and global warming.
Associate Professor Andrew King, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne, says the climate attribution field started about 20 years ago.
“It’s grown over time and become a bit more sophisticated, and particularly in the last few years there’s been more of a focus on rapid analyses, where even during an extreme event, or shortly after, there’s an attempt to have numbers on the role of climate change,” King says.
“We’re all used to having weather forecasts but 100 years ago weather prediction wasn’t operational, it w
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