In the mountains, an echo repeats any shout, and you can't immediately tell who shouted: a person or the wind. That's roughly how climate scientists work when they try to understand why an unusual heat wave or drought happened. They look for a human fingerprint in a weather disaster, but nature has its own voices that can sound similar.
The standard approach to extreme event attribution relies on a statistical relationship between local records and global average temperature. If, as the planet warms by one degree, heat in a particular region becomes more frequent, that is considered a human contribution. The authors of the study tested this method on three cases: the Siberian heat of 2020, the Australian fires of 2019–2020, and the drought in Madagascar. They took a 1800-year climate simulation without anthropogenic influence and applied the same procedure to it as they did to real observations.
This means that natural variability, such as El Niño, can produce a false appearance of a strong link between local extremes and global warming. In observations for Australia, the estimate of the parameter is about 2 °C per degree, which falls in the upper range of model values, indicating a possible bias. For Madagascar, there was too little data: only 14 points, and no significant relationship could be detected.
The study does not refute the link between warming and extreme weather in general. But it shows that the attribution tool itself can fail due to internal climate variability. Previously, it was thought that a statistical relationship directly pointed to humans. Now it is clear that nature can mimic this signal. Therefore, the authors propose additional statistical tests and a more cautious interpretation of results.
An echo in the mountains does not always deceive, but you still need to check it. The same goes for weather attributions: before attributing a disaster to humans, you should make sure the voice is not nature's own. This matters for insurance companies, policymakers, and everyone planning adaptation to a changing climate.
Verkhoyansk, where 38 °C was recorded in 2020, is considered one of the cold poles of the Northern Hemisphere: in winter, temperatures there drop below −60 °C.
In Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 'The Ministry for the Future', heat in India becomes a catalyst for global action, but the attribution of a specific event remains a matter of debate, as in this paper.