Climate scientists have proposed two methods to link extreme weather events and anthropogenic climate forcing: the probabilistic and the storyline approach. Proponents of the first approach have raised the criticism that the storyline approach could be overstating the role of anthropogenic climate change. This issue has important implications because, in certain contexts, decision-makers might seek to avoid information that overstates the effects of anthropogenic climate change. In this paper, we explore two research questions. First, whether and to what extent the storyline approach overstates the effects of anthropogenic climate change. Second, whether the objections offered against the storyline approach constitute good reasons to prefer the probabilistic approach. Concerning the first question, we show that the storyline approach does not necessarily overstate the effects of climate change, and particularly not for the reasons offered by proponents of the probabilistic approach. Concerning the second question, we show, independently, that the probabilistic approach faces the same or very similar objections to those raised against the storyline approach due to the lack of robustness of climate models and the way events are commonly defined when applying the probabilistic approach. These results suggest that these objections might not constitute good reasons to prefer the probabilistic approach over the storyline approach.

气候科学家提出了两种将极端天气事件和人为气候强迫联系起来的方法：概率方法和故事情节方法。第一种方法的支持者提出了批评，认为故事情节方法可能夸大了人为气候变化的作用。这个问题具有重要意义，因为在某些情况下，决策者可能会寻求避免夸大人为气候变化影响的信息。在本文中，我们探讨了两个研究问题。首先，故事情节的方法是否以及在多大程度上夸大了人为气候变化的影响。其次，对故事情节方法提出的反对意见是否构成了选择概率方法的充分理由。关于第一个问题，我们表明故事情节方法不一定夸大气候变化的影响，特别是不会出于概率方法支持者所提供的原因。关于第二个问题，我们独立地表明，由于气候模型缺乏稳健性以及应用概率方法时通常定义事件的方式，概率方法面临着与故事情节方法相同或非常相似的反对意见。这些结果表明，这些反对意见可能并不能构成选择概率方法而不是故事情节方法的充分理由。