Quantifying Causes and Consequences of Historical Changes in Extreme Climate Conditions

August 29, 2024

Noah Diffenbaugh

Hosted by Libby Barnes

Abstract

Although the world is making progress in ramping up ambition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it has now also become clear that people and ecosystems are being impacted by the global warming that has already occurred – and that those impacts are accelerating. Managing these risks – and ultimately reducing climate impacts – requires improved understanding not only of the factors that shape vulnerability of people and ecosystems, but also of the physical processes that regulate the climatic conditions that have the greatest impact. This seminar will present research over the past several years to (i) quantify changes in different kinds of extreme events over the historical record; (ii) understand the physical causes of those changes; (iii) quantify the contribution of anthropogenic forcing to those changes; and (iv) quantify the impacts relative to a counterfactual world in which there had been no anthropogenic climate forcing. Much of the most recent work in these areas uses machine learning approaches that help build a bridge between climate model simulations and climate observations. This machine learning-based work has been made possible through collaborations with experts at CSU.