For decades, TV weather reporters have not done a good job linking the effects of climate change to the specific weather disasters that they are describing for their audience.
That’s starting to change – and the ramifications are not just on the news.
The World Weather Attribution (WWA) group began 10 years ago as a rapid-response team showing how the warming planet intensified individual storms, heat waves and droughts. And TV forecasters have relied on the group’s analyses to shift the climate conversation.
“The science is so undeniable,” said CNN meteorologist Elisa Raffa, whose team regularly cites WWA reports. “Meteorologists are talking about it more because it’s a part of the story, it’s right there in front of our faces.”
In 2004, a Nature study was the first to show how climate change increased the odds of a specific extreme weather event (in that case, the deadly 2003 European heat wave). But the international scientists behind WWA wanted to speed up the analysis process — known as attribution science — to communicate climate change’s influence on weather in near-real time when the public is most likely to be paying attention.
The Nature study took more than a year to publish. Relying on similar peer-reviewed techniques, WWA has cut that timeline down to days and published dozens of analyses; the group’s recent report on Hurricane Milton took less than 48 hours. The team commemorated its 10th anniversary last week with an analysisshowing climate change contributed to more than 570,000 deaths across 10 of the deadliest weather events since 2004.
“Many people now understand that climate change is already making life more dangerous,” Friederike Otto, who co-founded the group, said of WWA’s work in a press briefing. “The study is our 90th and underscores the simple fact that burning fossil fuels causes climate change, and climate change causes death and destruction.”
“You want to be able to make the connection between climate change and extreme weather very quickly, because your viewers have a very limited attention span,” said Berardelli, WFLA News Channel 8’s chief meteorologist.
Climate change made Hurricane Helene more powerful, rainier, and significantly more likely. And as temperatures continue to warm, the U.S. can expect more storms like Helene in the future.
Those are the findings of a study released Wednesday by researchers with World Weather Attribution, an international network of scientists who conduct rapid studies to assess the impact of climate change on major weather events.
The study found that rainfall from Helene was about 10% heavier due to human-caused climate change. That’s a massive amount of additional precipitation, and similar to other damaging, climate-fueled hurricanes in the past decade, like Hurricanes Harvey and Ian.
Climate change also made such heavy rainfall up to 70% more likely in central and southern Appalachia, where catastrophic flooding washed away roads, destroyed homes and businesses, and left thousands of people still without power two weeks later. So far, 230 people have died from the storm, though the true human toll will take years to fully determine.
“We found that essentially all aspects of this event [were] amplified by climate change to different degrees,” says Ben Clarke, an extreme weather researcher at Imperial College, London, and an author of the study. “We’ll see more of the same as the world continues to warm.”
Many of those same conditions are now fueling Hurricane Milton, which is currently headed toward Florida as a major, life-threatening storm.
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As attribution studies get more reliable, the fossil fuel industry starts to look like the tobacco industry in terms of legal exposure.