Don't blame climate change for disasters; extreme weather can't be explained by global warming

tech.hindustantimes.com:

As a pioneer in so-called attribution science -- establishing a link between extreme weather and climate change -- Friederike Otto is adamant that the rising toll of heatwaves and hurricanes cannot be explained by global warming alone. AFP spoke to Otto, a physicist at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, ahead of the release of a major UN climate report on climate change impacts and how humanity can adapt to them.

To talk about natural disasters the way that we usually do is not very helpful because it turns the attention away from the agency that we have as humans.

You have to search very hard to find climate disasters that are purely natural. Even without climate change, if humans are involved, such disasters occur for the most part when vulnerability and exposure meet extreme weather events. Global warming just makes it worse.

Last year there were major floods in western Germany which led to lots of lost lives, damaged property.

Yes, climate change made the rainfall more intense. But even without global warming there would have been a huge, heavy rainfall event. And it would have landed in a densely populated geography where the rivers flood very easily and the water has nowhere to go.

When we started to do attribution, everyone -- we, the media -- were excited to finally have an answer to the question: what is the role of climate change in these disasters? It was a breakthrough to be able to say an individual event was made, say, 10 times more likely.

But if we ignore vulnerability, then we also ignore to a large degree what we can actually do to cope with and protect ourselves from climate change.

The goal... is not so much to pinpoint fault or blame, but to understand the causes. The next