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Questions about the link between flooding in the UK and climate change could be answered within two years, according to a leading scientist. Prof Myles Allen from Oxford University said the only thing holding back the work was the lack of investment.
Around £10m a year would provide a real time attribution system on the role of humans in extreme weather. He said it was a "scandal" that the public should be denied clarity on this issue.
Scientists are notoriously cautious about linking single weather events, such as the recent storms and flooding in the UK, to rising global temperatures.
The public is paying that money in the name of doing something about climate change, they deserve to know what climate change is doing to them”
Prof Myles AllenOxford University Researchers can discern a human fingerprint in extreme weather, but it has required huge amounts of computing power to calculate all the possible outcomes.
We are now seeing a similar pattern; 1) following a significant natural disaster, folks are now primed to at least discuss a possible tie-in with climate change, but they 2) take their cue from researchers who note that we can't definitively say if event A is directly attributable to a changed climate, this leads some to then 3) get upset and say "how can you say that? It is obvious..." and others to say "you can never tell: ask the scientists."
With the rising number of disasters (especially in the coastal zone) a separate way to investigate this is to look for a pattern in these extreme events themselves. For example, NOAA now has a database of weather-related "billion dollar events." This certainly seems an area worthy of spending some additional funds. At the risk of a scientist asking for more money for science (a pox in some regions, I know), having a better understanding of the relationships to a changing climate is/would be a good thing.