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The Next Frontier of Attribution Science Has Arrived

heatmap.news · 7h · first reportShare

Europe’s record-breaking heat wave in 2025 would have been a third of a degree Celsius cooler if not for emissions released just since the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2015, researchers found in a new study published Tuesday by the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters . The research marks a step forward for attribution science, which has traditionally worked to tie extreme events such as heat waves and floods to climate change writ large. Now, using artificial intelligence trained on climate models, researchers have managed to link extreme weather to a specific subset of emissions. “Not only does every little bit of emissions count, but the amount of emissions released since 2015 significantly increased the temperature of [the 2025 European] heat wave,” Jared Trok, the study’s lead author and a PhD student at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, told me. “Before this paper” — which found 99-in-100 odds that human-caused emissions since 2015 increas