How do we know that a change in the climate, for example, rainfall trends in recent decades, is due to human activity like burning fossil fuels? How do we know it’s not natural variability?
This is the question we’ve started to look at in the first four parts of this series.
When it comes to attribution there are 1000s of papers considering the attribution of various trends in climate metrics to human activity (primarily burning fossil fuels).
Here’s what the 6th assessment report (AR6) says about attribution in plain English:
We need to make some assumptions: observed changes are due to a simple addition of forced changes (e.g effects from more CO2 in the atmosphere) and natural variability; and we can work out natural variability
Another way to write the second part:
If we don’t understand natural variability then our assessment could well be wrong.
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