As fires rage across Australia, floods wash away villages and temperatures break records, scientists are wheeled out and asked by journalists is this climate change? The answer is always fudged, along the lines of “individual events cannot be put down to climate change, this is just an extreme of weather, only further research can tell if there is a connection.” This proper and natural scientific caution has been reinforced by decades of attacks by the fossil fuel lobby, plus threats to remove grants and university tenure. The same cautious approach has also infected science journalists who repeat the same formula.
But this mantra “It’s weather not climate” can now be discarded because Swiss scientists have shown that windstorms, floods, droughts and heat waves – events as short as a single day – can be placed firmly at the door of global heating.
The weather will go on varying wildly from day to day but the Swiss have been able to prove that these swings are made worse by extra temperature and moisture in the atmosphere. In other words every extreme has been made greater by man-made climate change. Let us hope that every climate scientist and journalist reads the Swiss paper and when asked the question “Is this global heating?” now just says “yes.”
