Washington DC - A leading US science body will launch a major climate change report on Thursday, looking specifically at extreme weather events, despite continuing opposition from the Trump administration.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) will publish "Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts," their first update on the topic in a decade.
NASEM is a collection of independent nonprofit institutions that operate under an 1863 charter signed by president Abraham Lincoln.
"Since 2016, attribution science and applications have rapidly advanced, making this new study a timely assessment of the current scientific understanding and capabilities for extreme event attribution," NASEM said on its website.
Ahead of its publication, Republican lawmakers have sought to cast doubt on the authors' work – sending, for example, a letter in April to the president of NASEM alleging bias and demanding details on the authors' professional ties.
Separately, Republican Senator Ted Cruz and others have introduced the "Stop Climate Shakedowns Act," a bill that would block climate damage lawsuits from proceeding in court.
Attribution science seeks to untangle how much human-caused climate change shaped a specific heatwave, storm, or flood, and its findings now shape litigation and policy.
The field first emerged in the 1990s and is now more visible than ever thanks to the rise of rapid analysis studies that can detect the signature of global warming on disasters within days.
The nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) says it expects a coordinated campaign to target both the report and its individual authors.
"The Academies have released reports on all types of different scientific developments and advances. I'm not aware of any that have been subject to this level of scrutiny," Carly Phillips, a senior scientist at UCS, told the AFP.