Environmental catastrophes, climate change, and attribution.

Area of Science:

• Environmental Science
• Ecology
• Climate Science

Background:

• Extreme weather events cause significant environmental and ecological damage.
• Understanding these disasters requires integrating biological and physical scientific perspectives.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop joint causal accounts of environmental disasters by uniting biological and physical understandings of extreme events.
• To explore methods for describing ecological and extreme weather events with fine-grained spatial and temporal detail.

Main Methods:

• Reviewing and integrating disparate biological and physical literature.
• Applying "storyline" and probabilistic "risk-based" approaches for event attribution.
• Utilizing a forensic approach common in ecological literature for analyzing causes and mechanisms.

Main Results:

• Both "storyline" and "risk-based" approaches are useful for describing extreme events.
• The "storyline" approach aligns well with the ecological literature's forensic methods.
• Preliminary examples demonstrate the potential for detailed causal studies.

Conclusions:

• Integrating biological and physical sciences is crucial for understanding environmental catastrophes.
• The "storyline" approach offers a robust framework for detailed causal analysis of ecological impacts from extreme weather.