Kindle Notes & Highlights
But that’s only an average, so if you have two such floods in a hundred-year period, does that mean the risk has doubled, or maybe that you are now “safe” for the next two hundred years? Or is it just a statistical fluke, similar to flipping a coin and getting two heads in a row just by chance?
No single event, such as the deadly heat wave that hit Europe in 2003 or the 2010 floods in Pakistan or heat and wildfires in Russia, can be definitely blamed on climate change: we think that climate change has made events like these more likely, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t have happened anyway.
For single events like these, the best scientists can do is calculate whether climate change has tipped the odds in favor of such events happening—whether the coin you’re flipping has become slightly loaded in favor of tails, for example. A study published in 2005 showed just that kind of loading for the European heat wave of 2003.
