Is climate change to blame?

After an extreme weather event, people often ask: is climate change to blame? On June 12, 2024, the Yale Center for Environmental Communication hosted an insightful discussion on attribution science — a field focused on determining the influence of human-induced climate change on extreme weather events.

This discussion was moderated by Dr. Jennifer Marlon, Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of the Environment. It featured a panel of expert climate scientists and communicators including Dr. Friederike Otto, Dr. Andrew Pershing, and Dr. Laura Thomas-Walters. They covered how scientists establish these connections and effective ways to communicate the impact of human-caused climate change on extreme weather events, drawing on message testing research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.