Abstract
Probabilistic event attribution aims to quantify the role of anthropogenic climate change in altering the intensity or probability of extreme climate and weather events. It was originally conceived to calculate the costs associated with any increased likelihood of the meteorological event in question. However, only recently have such studies attempted to divide liability between polluting nations and ascribe a cost. Recent protests indicate a perception that older generations have the greater responsibility for climate change. In this paper, we examine how a portion of the cost of an event can be attributed to any individual person, according to their age and nationality. We demonstrate that this is quantitatively feasible using the example of the 2018 summer heatwave in eastern China and its impact on aquaculture. A relatively simple technique finds sample individuals responsible for between 0.53 and 18.10 yuan, increasing with their age and their country’s emissions over their adult lifetime since the first international consensus on carbon emissions was reached. This provides an illustration of the scale of such responsibilities, and how it is affected by national development and demographics. Such data can support decisions, at national and international levels, on how to fund recovery from climate impacts. It offers a simple quantitative approach for individuals to know their impact on the climate, or for governments to use in making policy decisions about how best to distribute costs of climate change.
Highlights
How can we divide up the cost of the impact of an extreme event? Event attribution studies have been doing the first stage of this for many years
By examining the 5th to 95th bootstrap percentiles of the Gumbel fit to carbon emissions, we find that the sample uncertainty from using this observationbased technique with only 57 sample years is much larger than that produced by emission date in table 2
We have attributed a fraction of the probability of an extreme event to the carbon emissions of an individual
Summary
Fraser C Lott , Andrew Ciavarella, John J Kennedy, Andrew D King , Peter A Stott, Simon F B Tett and Dongqian Wang. We examine how a portion of the cost of an event can be attributed to any individual person, according to their age and nationality We demonstrate that this is quantitatively feasible using the example of the 2018 summer heatwave in eastern China and its impact on aquaculture. A relatively simple technique finds sample individuals responsible for between 0.53 and 18.10 yuan, increasing with their age and their country’s emissions over their adult lifetime since the first international consensus on carbon emissions was reached. This provides an illustration of the scale of such responsibilities, and how it is affected by national development and demographics. It offers a simple quantitative approach for individuals to know their impact on the climate, or for governments to use in making policy decisions about how best to distribute costs of climate change
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