Abstract
In our discussion of environmental and ecological catastrophes or disasters resulting from extreme weather events, we unite disparate literatures, the biological and the physical. Our goal is to tie together biological understandings of extreme environmental events with physical understandings of extreme weather events into joint causal accounts. This requires fine‐grained descriptions, in both space and time, of the ecological, evolutionary, and biological moving parts of a system together with fine‐grained descriptions, also in both space and time, of the extreme weather events. We find that both the “storyline” approach to extreme event attribution and the probabilistic “risk‐based” approach have uses in such descriptions. However, the storyline approach is more readily aligned with the forensic approach to evidence that is prevalent in the ecological literature, which cultivates expert‐based rules of thumb, that is, heuristics, and detailed methods for analyzing causes and mechanisms. We introduce below a number of preliminary examples of such studies as instances of what could be pursued in the future in much more detail.
Highlights
It is widely recognized that climate change has the potential to induce environmental catastrophes, such as ecosystem collapse.[1]
The various case studies discussed above illustrate that the probabilistic, risk-based approach to extreme event attribution
largely unconditional questions about changes in likelihood or magnitude of the event arising from climate change
Summary
It is widely recognized that climate change has the potential to induce environmental catastrophes, such as ecosystem collapse.[1] It is widely recognized that many impacts of climate change occur through extreme weather events.[1] This is because human and natural systems always have a certain degree of resilience to fluctuations, and it is the fluctuations outside the resilience boundaries of the system that lead to detrimental impacts, or even to system collapse. We mean any extreme fluctuation in the state of the physical climate system (including the ocean) that has a component of natural variability. The concept includes both shortterm events, such as tropical cyclones, and longterm events, such as multiyear drought, as well as compound events.[2]
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