Connecting Climate Change to the Weather We See, with Emily Theokritoff

Notable Quotes

• Understanding the causes of extreme weather events can help people understand their personal experience with a changing climate: “Often, we hear about the climate warming by 1.3°C at the global level, but it’s quite hard for individuals within their own life and within their own context to actually feel what this is. This field of [extreme weather attribution] breaks down specific events that people actually might have experienced.” (4:42)
• Estimating the future impacts of climate change can inform planning and policymaking: “Attribution studies can use the climate models to look into the future—to look at how extreme weather events would look in a world that is 2°C or 3°C warmer, for example. This really drives home the need for mitigation—that we are definitely not adapted and prepared for what is to come, and that it’s really important to cut emissions, because limits to adaptation will soon be reached in this case.” (17:11)
• Addressing gaps in climate data, particularly in the Global South: “To do attribution science, there’s a need for high-quality and long-term observational data. If there’s no data about the past, it’s very hard to recreate [it]. There are scientists working on developing approaches for regions where this baseline data simply doesn’t exist. But it’s also about finding strategies like setting up new weather stations and collecting more data going forward, because it’s very challenging to recreate this data from the past.” (20:29)

Top of the Stack

• Mapped: How Climate Change Affects Extreme Weather Around the World from Carbon Brief

The Full Transcript

Kristin Hayes: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Kristin Hayes. My guest today is Dr. Emily Theokritoff, a research associate in climate damage attribution at the Grantham Institute of Imperial College London. I'll crib from her bio for just a minute and note that she works on determining the “share of additional human impacts that occur due to climate change during extreme weather events, such as heat waves and storms.”

That topic, referred to as “extreme weather attribution” and the subsequent “impact attribution,” is the subject of our conversation today. In other words, How exactly do researchers go about determining which events were made more extreme by climate change and by how much, and how does that translate into understanding enhanced impacts on the ground? My sense is that the research community has gotten considerably more confident in making definitive statements in this area, and I'm keen to test that theory with someone in the know. Stay with us.

Hi Emily. It's great to be connected, and thank you so much for coming on the show to talk with me today.

Emily Theokritoff: Hi. Thanks a lot for having me.

Kristin Hayes: I'd like to start by inviting you to introduce yourself and your work to our listeners.

Emily Theokritoff: As you mentioned, I'm Emily. I'm a researcher at Imperial College London, based at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and Environment, which is the climate change hub within the university that does a lot of work on outreach, policy, innovation, and climate research. I'm currently leading the development of a global and rapid impact-attribution framework that looks at producing estimates from impacts that occur from extreme weather events in a timely manner as events unfold globally.

I've been working in the field of climate change for about eight years. After my studies in environmental engineering, I joined a climate and science policy think tank called Climate Analytics that gave me the opportunity to do a PhD. There, I explored the topic of climate change adaptation, which looks at how humans can adapt and hinder some of the risks and impacts that arise from climate change. More specifically, I looked at the constraints—that is, what makes adaptation so difficult and the limits to this adaptation.

Kristin Hayes: That's great. I came across your work in the context of this attribution science conversation. Let me start by asking you what may feel, to you, like basic definitional questions, but that will be really helpful for the rest of our conversation.

Can you provide a brief explanation of what extreme weather attributions and impact attributions are and how those disciplines have evolved over the past couple of decades? I know that's a tall order. I know this is complex stuff, but I'd welcome your introduction on those topics.

Emily Theokritoff: Definitely. Extreme weather attribution aims to answer a relatively straightforward question—it's a question of whether climate change has actually influenced an extreme weather event or not. In the case that it has influenced it, scientists ask the question of whether this extreme event was made more likely and more intense because of climate change.

This field has been around for around 20 years, as you mentioned in the question. The first study on this topic that I'm aware of was published in 2004. There was a scientist from the University of Oxford who looked at the heat wave in Europe in 2003. They were, for the first time, able to make the link between climate change and the increased risk of this heat wave.

Impact attribution goes one step further in the causal chain. Once we have information on how much more intense an extreme weather event has been made, we are also able to make calculations on how much worse impacts have been made. It's a more novel field and definitely more in the exploratory phase, I would say, but scientists are starting to be able to make statements on how much more a storm has cost because of climate change, for example, or how many more people have died in a heat wave because of increased intensity and because the temperature is warmer due to climate change.

Kristin Hayes: Perhaps this goes without saying, but I'm going to ask it anyway: Why do these attribution-science questions matter? Why are we keen to be able to give more specificity to what the extreme weather impacts or the on-the-ground impacts look like?

Emily Theokritoff: It's a great way to understand, in a tangible way, what climate change is. Often, we hear about the climate warming by 1.3°C at the global level, but it's quite hard for individuals within their own life and within their own context, to actually feel what this is. This field of science breaks down specific events that people actually might have experienced.

Whenever an extreme weather event would happen, around 10 years ago, this question was asked a lot: Has climate change influenced this event or not? Science was in the early days of answering this question, but nowadays, we're seeing that there's a large growth of these types of studies, and scientists are able to answer this type of question quite well.

Kristin Hayes: That's great. Thank you. We're going to spend most of our conversation talking about impact attribution, which, as you mentioned, is newer and is, as I understand it, your area of growth and expertise. But I did want to open with just one question on extreme weather attribution.

What are the main scientific and technical challenges that arise in attributing specific weather events, at least in attributing the extremity of specific weather events, to climate change? How do scientists actually go about that? What are the challenges? How do you deal with uncertainty in those findings?

Emily Theokritoff: There is a large array of challenges that are encountered. Specifically, when it comes to data availability, there are some challenges. We're seeing, currently, in the attribution studies that exist and that are published to date, there's a large bias of these studies in the Global North. This doesn't mean that there are more extreme weather events that occur there; it just means that there is better data, and there are more scientists working on these topics in this area. This is definitely something that needs to be improved.

In terms of the different types of extreme weather events, some types of extreme weather events are easier to assess than others. For example, heat waves are probably the most studied type of extreme weather event, because they’re considered to be rather straightforward, because they’re mainly driven by thermodynamic influences. But other types of extreme weather events result from more complex dynamics, which can make them harder to simulate. We're seeing some improvements in studying different types of extreme weather events, such as droughts and wildfires.

In terms of uncertainties, the inherent nature of this type of work—working with climate models, observations, and so on—means there will always be a certain number of uncertainties. But this growing body of literature has shown that different types of methods and different types of studies allow us to reach similar conclusions. In the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, we also see very strong language about the fact that most of the world is experiencing extreme weather that is being influenced by climate change. For example, specifically for heat waves, it's virtually certain that all heat waves are becoming more intense and more frequent because of climate change. This is a really strong advancement of this field in recent years.

Kristin Hayes: Interesting.

You mentioned at the outset that you studied environmental engineering. Based on your answer to that last question, I want to ask: What are the different types of expertise or fields of study that come into play in this discipline?

Emily Theokritoff: It's a very interdisciplinary field, especially when you go down to the level of impact, where I'm currently working. The people working on hazard attribution, who look more directly at the physics of it, tend to be physicists. But when you go down to the impact level, there's a need for a very large set of skills and a lot of collaboration amongst people. If we look, for example, at some of the health impacts that arise from climate change, there's a need for a lot of health expertise, for example; for labor productivity expertise … for many different fields, yes.

Kristin Hayes: That's interesting. As you were describing the advancements, it did occur to me that all those disciplines would have to work together, as you just confirmed. This really does take a village, so to speak.

Emily Theokritoff: Yes, indeed.

Kristin Hayes: Most of our listeners here on Resources Radio don't mind us going into the weeds for a little while, so this is my in-the-weeds question about some of the methods that are used in these attribution studies. We can certainly focus on the impact-attribution side and either range of content that you'd like to cover, but what are some of the key methods used in these attribution studies? You mentioned climate modeling and data. Have improvements in those areas helped to strengthen the reliability of these studies?

Emily Theokritoff: There is really a very large diversity of methods that exist, so I will definitely not be exhaustive here, I can define the main ones.

The oldest and the first methodology that was developed for extreme weather event attribution is known as the probabilistic approach. This is where scientists use climate models that are run thousands of times in two scenarios. The first is a scenario of current global warming, where we have 1.3°C of global warming. The second scenario is a world without climate change, before the pre-industrial era when we didn't have additional greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This allows us to compare possible weather in these two different scenarios and make statements about how much more likely and how much more intense this event has become.

Another approach, which was developed more recently, is the storyline approach. This is when researchers identify different physical components that constitute an extreme weather event, such as sea surface temperature, humidity, atmospheric dynamics, and how these different components led to the extreme weather event unfolding in the way it did. Scientists use these models to, in both the world with climate change and the world without climate change, model this event to understand how it occurred and see how much worse climate change made it.

Impact attribution would be the step after these methodologies. Let’s take the example of a tropical cyclone. Once we know that climate change has made the winds more intense by six meters per second, we then take this value and put this into a damage function, which has been established based on previous data of impacts from previous storms. These functions then allow us to translate how this increased intensity results in increased economic damages, for example, in this case.

Kristin Hayes: It sounds like the models are pretty central to these extreme weather attribution studies. So, I'm guessing that, as climate models have gotten more robust, that's led to the increased confidence in these attribution studies. Is that a fair statement?

Emily Theokritoff: Yes, definitely. That's a fair statement. We also have more observational data, because climate change is, unfortunately, intensifying, and we're seeing more extreme weather events. So, this has definitely increased the reliability of the results. The gap that I mentioned previously, between data in the Global North and in more low-income countries in the Global South, is also seeing small progress. But it’s still not like an equal representation to what we're seeing from countries in the Global North. This is another large area for improvement that has to be tackled in the coming years.

Kristin Hayes: I hope we'll have a chance to talk about that further, because my understanding is that a lot of the predicted impacts are likely to happen in the Global South, so understanding the connection and getting better data for that part of the world feels pretty critical.

There was something you mentioned early on that I'd love to ask you a question about. You mentioned this in your introduction, but I wanted to talk about this rapid-response-attribution field as a complement to some of the longer-term studies that I would say have been the mainstay for a long time. These older studies from back in 2004, for example, were pretty long-term research studies. But my understanding is that the community of researchers like you felt like it was important to give information fairly quickly after an extreme weather event, because that was the moment when people were focused on it, when people needed this data to understand and connect it to what was happening in the real world, and while the focus was on the event.

I gave my own answer, I suppose, to why it feels like this rapid-response attribution is important, but I'd love to turn that over to you. Why do you feel like that rapid response matters? How are researchers, who do want to provide some of this information faster, working to ensure that faster studies still maintain the rigor that you might be able to achieve over a long period of time?

Emily Theokritoff: I'm happy to talk about this. Imperial College London is actually where the scientists that pioneered these types of rapid studies under the World Weather Attribution initiative are based. So, I'm happy to talk a bit about the work of my colleagues there.

They came up with this model of publishing these rapid studies 10 years ago, now, to tackle this issue. As you mentioned, the moment when extreme weather events occur is when there's the greatest attention on these extreme weather events—the media is focused on it, people are reporting on it, and it’s a great way to communicate on science and on climate change, because a lot of attention is on it and people tend to care about it.

If we were to follow the classic scientific process of going through peer review, it would take between one and two years to actually publish a paper. While there might be a small amount of media coverage when a scientific paper comes out, it will not have as much impact as if it's published while the event is actually unfolding. This was the really strong motivation to do this.

What one must know when looking at these rapid studies is that they're based on peer-reviewed, established methodologies. The methodologies that are being used have already been used numerous times and have been reviewed by other scientists. The reports also undergo a process of internal review, so the studies often involve a large number of scientists, including scientists based in the region where the extreme weather event has occurred—so there is some internal review there.

In the long term, the aim is always to publish a paper that accompanies these rapid studies, which then builds trust with the journalists that we interact with and so on. I think it's a great way to communicate in an effective way about scientific findings in this case.

Kristin Hayes: That's a really interesting model. You've compressed the peer-review process without losing the peer-review process in a way that leads to real-world communications impacts.

Let's talk about that for another minute, about how the world of attribution studies has come into the public understanding and influenced either public understanding or policymaking around climate change. I have other questions for you, but let me start with that one.

Emily Theokritoff: The main point that comes to my mind, at first, is that it raises general awareness about how we're able to now answer this very simple question that a lot of people are asking themselves: To what extent is climate change influencing the extreme weather that we experience ourselves? So, that was the main outlet there. But there are other ways that attribution science is influencing the general debate.

There's one exciting field of climate litigation that I've been involved with to a certain extent. It looks at court cases that are centered around climate change issues. We're starting to see that attribution studies can be used as lines of evidence to complement a specific court case.

I can give a short example on this: There was a famous case last year, in 2024, in Switzerland, where a group of elderly Swiss women won a case in the European Court of Human Rights. The women were saying that they were more vulnerable to the increasing heat because of their gender and their age. They used an attribution study that showed that, in their specific context in Switzerland, there have been more deaths during heat waves because of climate change there. This was really groundbreaking and a great way of using attribution science, in my opinion.

With regards to policymaking, there are a lot of avenues in which science can inform decisions. Attribution studies can use the climate models to look into the future—to look at how extreme weather events would look in a world that is 2°C or 3°C warmer, for example. This really drives home the need for mitigation—that we are definitely not adapted and prepared for what is to come, and that it's really important to cut emissions, because limits to adaptation will soon be reached in this case.

Kristin Hayes: Those are great examples.

There’s one other thing that I've been thinking about in terms of the communications aspect of this: I've seen this reality a lot at Resources for the Future, where researchers really want to be very precise in how they communicate, since there are a lot of nuances and subtleties in their studies. The media, of course, is interested in delivering messages that are understandable and concise, and there can be a tension there. I imagine it's heightened in this particular field where there are complicated studies that need to be translated into things that the public can really relate to. How well would you say the media do at representing these attribution study findings? Are there misconceptions? Are there misinterpretations? Or do you find that, for the most part, people are able to take this information and process it out to the public in a fairly productive and useful way?

Emily Theokritoff: From my experience, I've had really good experiences from the journalists and newspapers I've been exposed to. I would say in recent years there's been much more climate change reporting, so I definitely think that journalists are becoming more climate literate, in a way. I've also, for example, been receiving some media training, so I think scientists like me are also, hopefully, working in this field and learning how to communicate their findings better. In that sense, I feel like a conversation is happening there and things are improving.

I would say this is the case for the media outlets that base their articles on scientific findings. There are of course still the media outlets that push nonscientific narratives, let's call them, which are another issue. What we experienced last year as Hurricane Helene and Milton hit Florida is that a lot of the misinformation that was circulating at that time took a lot of space from the reporting of these extreme events, which then left a lot less space for the science there. This is the challenge that we're going to see a bit more of, unfortunately, in the close future.

Kristin Hayes: I'm glad to hear that your experiences have been good. I do want to give credit to all the science journalists out there. It's a good reminder that journalists have an incentive to understand scientific findings robustly and to communicate them well. Researchers also have an incentive, given the work you do, to become better communicators. Both sides are working towards the same objective there, which is great.

We talked a little bit about the fact that data can be sparse in certain parts of the world, and particularly in the less developed Global South. I'm wondering if you can say a little bit more about that. What efforts are underway to gather more data to make these types of studies more available to the Global South?

Emily Theokritoff: There's definitely an issue with the availability of data, because to do attribution science, there's a need for high-quality and long-term observational data. If there's no data about the past, it's very hard to recreate this. There are scientists working on developing approaches for regions where this baseline data simply doesn't exist. But it's also about finding strategies like setting up new weather stations and collecting more data going forward, because it's very challenging to recreate this data from the past.

Kristin Hayes: Right. You mentioned relationships with scientists—there's scientists from those locales actually participating in these research studies, too, which, I'm sure, doesn't solve all the data challenges but at least is a step in the right direction of knowing people who might be able to access data that might not be as publicly available. But yes, that does sound like a big challenge, and I didn't really think about that baseline setting as a starting place that you need, but, of course, it is. I do hope that that's something that can continue to evolve. As you mentioned, I'm sure people are working on that, too. I'm sure people are working on lots of things!

Let me close the meatiest part of our conversation by asking you to tell us what's ahead. What advancements do you expect in this area of attribution science over the next few years, over the next decade? How do you think those advancements might end up changing the global conversation a little bit?

Emily Theokritoff: I'll answer the question from my angle of impact attribution, the topic that I focus on. I hope we're going to see many more impact studies being published and methodologies being developed. In the last year, actually, we've seen quite a few studies that looked into heat waves and loss of lives from heat waves. As part of my project, we’re looking at developing a methodology that can more systematically look at heat waves as they occur. In general, like impact attribution, there hopefully will be more work looking also at economic costs of extreme weather events and really bringing these tangible impacts forward to the wider public—to communicate around these and make it even more clear, if it's needed, how devastating climate change actually is—and having better information on impacts.

In this context, one of the large political topics that is being explored at the moment is the topic of loss and damage, which has gotten a lot of attention in recent years, particularly because of the establishment of the loss and damage fund within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This fund was established, and countries are currently discussing how this fund should actually work, where the money should go, in which way, and so on.

I think it's very hard to have total global estimates on how much climate change costs and other types of non-economic impacts. But having more precise examples of how much worse climate change is making these impacts can be of help in this debate. It can also help in compensating countries and communities for the climate change impacts; in this case, in the Global South.

Kristin Hayes: Right.

This has been great. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk through what is, again, a pretty complex but very important and rapidly evolving part of the climate change research portfolio. Thank you.

I'll close with our regular Top of the Stack feature. Normally, I leave this question wide open and let our guests recommend anything they'd like. But I feel like, given the importance and the complexity of this topic, I'd love to ask you to recommend any good resources you have on attribution science for people who are intrigued about learning more about the field. I'd welcome recommendations there, and then, of course, you're welcome to share any broader recommendations, as well.

Emily, what's on the top of your stack?

Emily Theokritoff: There's a map that I would recommend that was developed by Carbon Brief and updated, actually, at the end of last year, in November 2024. Carbon Brief is an online platform that reports on climate change. Basically, they update a map that brings together all the different attribution studies that have been published in the world. The map is called How Climate Change Affects Extreme Weather Around the World. It's a very good starting point to take a look at. First of all, it's very clear as to where the attribution studies are most concentrated, and then you can also look at the different types of extreme weather events that have been studied or not. That's a really good starting point.

My second tip would be to explore the website of my colleagues at World Weather Attribution that, as I mentioned, regularly look into assessing the influence of climate change on extreme weather. They very regularly have new studies coming up that then also get picked up in the media a lot. You can look at them in more detail on the website.

Kristin Hayes: Great. I have to say, at least in the guests that I've talked to, I think this is our first map that's been recommended as a Top of the Stack, so you've pioneered a whole new type of Top of the Stack. That's great. I love a good map, and that's a great recommendation. We will put links to those recommendations on the recording website. Hopefully folks can take a look and gather some more information on this topic.

Emily, thank you again. It's been great.

Emily Theokritoff: Thanks a lot for having me.

Kristin Hayes: You’ve been listening to Resources Radio, a podcast from Resources for the Future (RFF). If you have a minute, we’d really appreciate you leaving us a rating or comment on your podcast platform of choice. Also, feel free to send us your suggestions for future episodes.

This podcast is made possible with the generous financial support of our listeners. You can help us continue producing these kinds of discussions on the topics that you care about by making a donation to Resources for the Future online at rff.org/donate.

RFF is an independent, nonprofit research institution in Washington, DC. Our mission is to improve our environmental, energy, and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. The views expressed on this podcast are solely those of the podcast guests and may differ from those of RFF experts, its officers, or its directors. RFF does not take positions on specific legislative proposals.

Resources Radio is produced by Elizabeth Wason, with music by Daniel Raimi. Join us next week for another episode.