Attribution is a prodigious form of science: it determines how climate change has influenced the likelihood or intensity of specific extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, droughts, and floods.
Studies like these, going through peer-review, are usually published months or even years after an event occurred. The method used consists of eight steps, described here.
Alternatively, a rapid analysis can be carried out in just a few days, like this one by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) researchers who wanted to give a robust, scientific answer to the question: is climate change to blame?
In fact, they responded, yes: the floods that killed 24 people in Central Europe in September were made twice as likely by human-caused climate change. The WWA study urges readers to take action, as floods will become more destructive with further fossil fuel-induced warming, and highlights the accelerating costs of climate change after the European Union pledged €10 billion for flood repairs.
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Of course the topic made it to EU politics, too. At the first real plenary session of the freshly elected European Parliament, MEPs held a debate on the devastating floods, the loss of lives and the EU’s preparedness to act on such disasters – they admitted – “exacerbated by climate change”.
The problem for journalists is to make the connection between climate and rain without making assumptions in everyday news, which on the contrary requires rapid reporting of emergencies. Some of them managed to do a great job all around the affected countries, including Austria, Czechia, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia.
“A flood with nuances,” Teresa Wirth called it. Writing in Austrian newspaper Die Presse, she says the answer provided by WWA should satisfy everyone, the only problem being “that a story that is not black and white is often harder to understand or, for politicians and the media, harder to communicate”.
Antonio Piemontese warned about the lengthy process of research in Wired Italy.
“Science is not in a hurry,” Enrico Scoccimarro, director of the climate forecasting division of the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, told Piemontese. “We need weeks to provide an answer, also based on the availability of the computing resources needed to process the data,” he adds. However, what can be said, “is that the higher temperature of the oceans has now become a constant: and this factor, together with the greater energy available on the surface and the greater quantity of water contained in a column of warmer air, increases the probability of extreme events of this type. We have evidence of this both on the basis of historical data and future data.”
Besides, according to Piemontese, “the issue of attribution is central to moving away from opposing rhetoric”. “In a context characterised by the return of climate denialism, sticking to the facts is a necessity for the media”.
”Another key question,” writes Piemontese, “is whether Europe was ready to sustain the impact of such a mass of water. Something similar to cyclone Boris happened in May 2023 with the flood in Emilia-Romagna, when torrential rains hit the northern region [of Italy] causing extensive damage. Given that to reverse the course of global warming it is necessary, first of all, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (mitigation), the issue of adaptation remains on the table – the set of interventions useful for reducing the extent of damage when climate disasters occur – as it has been happening recently.”
Meanwhile, news outlets in the most affected countries are counting the victims and the damage and are worried about the future, with extreme weather events likely to recur with increasing frequency.
In Romanian Adevărul, Teodora Marinescu keeps track of the bad weather’s effects: “traffic temporarily stopped on a railway section, dozens of fallen trees, flooded houses and 5,438 people evacuated or who self-evacuated due to the danger of flooding.”
Katarzyna Przyborska from Krytyka Polityczna analysed the political side of the problem. She talked with Polish MEP Michał Kobosko, who put it simply: “We must deal with both the effects and the cause of the flood”. “If we do not want to see such images as we have seen in the Kłodzko Valley in recent days, we need to look at this problem in the long term and with due seriousness, including it in the Polish budget, as well as in the European Union budget for the years after 2027,” Kobosko added.
Matej Moravansky interviewed Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, professor of environmental sciences and vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for the Czech outlet Deník Referendum. “We are only beginning to imagine what will happen in the worst case scenario if we do not take very active and strong action on climate policies today,” Ürge-Vorsatz said. “For example, the recent floods, which are among the most extreme we have ever experienced, may become practically commonplace.”
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Meanwhile in Czech Republic, people worry about the coming of winter. “Thousands of people are still without electricity, gas or water after the floods […] In some municipalities, the networks will not work for several months,” Iva Bezděková and Tomáš Linhart investigated the situation for Deník N.
In Hungary, Rita Slavkovits writes for HVG: “climate change is not coming, it has already been here for some time”. Viktor Orbán’s far-right government, though, hasn’t proved much helpful by messing up his country’s relationship with Brussels and putting EU funding at risk. “There is not enough money to prevent the damage caused by climate change, but the Hungarian government is not working on how to get access to EU funds,” Slavkovits writes.
By the way, devastating floods will happen again – as estimated by WWA. Mathilde Frénois in Reporterre reports citizens describing a storm in Cannes on September 23 as “apocalyptic”. Even if this urbanisation is not systematically synonymous with artificialization of soils, “we must dare to preserve wetlands,” environmentalist Juliette Chesnel told Frénois, adding “we need political courage”. But for Jeannine Blondel, president of France Nature Environnement 06, “it is too late” as “agricultural land has completely disappeared. It is they who should act as a sponge, she assures. Cannes is one of the rare towns on the Côte d’Azur that is trying to do something to slow down flooding. But it is not enough. The watersheds are artificialised.”
