Attribution science
Discipline quantifying the extent to which climate change increased the probability or intensity of a given extreme event.
Attribution science is the discipline that quantifies the influence of anthropogenic climate change on a given extreme weather event, estimating by how much it increased that event's probability or intensity. Using climate models, it compares the real world with a counterfactual world without warming, to isolate the share attributable to human activity. For insurance and reinsurance, attribution has growing implications: it can feed climate litigation by establishing a link between emissions and damage, inform forward-looking pricing of perils whose frequency is shifting, and support loss and damage regimes at international level. It remains, however, surrounded by uncertainty, firmer for heatwaves than for complex phenomena such as cyclones or drought. Its rise transforms a hazard long treated as stationary into a risk whose drift becomes measurable and potentially actionable.
Textbook case: a rapid attribution study concluding that a heatwave was made several times more likely by warming can be entered into a climate litigation file.
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