Links between climate change and extreme weather are increasingly clear and present

[jpak]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2016/03/11/links-between-climate-change-and-extreme-weather-are-increasingly-clear-and-present/

When a hurricane, flood, heat wave, or other extreme weather event strikes, reporters call scientists like me and ask us what human-induced climate change had to do with this event. Until recently, most of us would say something like this: “Climate change is real. It alters the broader patterns, the statistics of weather. But we can’t attribute any single weather event to climate change.”

We are starting to respond differently. A new area of scientific research, known as “extreme event attribution”, has emerged to provide more substantive and quantitative answers. Our science has reached the point where we can look for the human influence on climate in single weather events, and sometimes find it.

Today, the National Academy of Sciences released the report, “Attribution of extreme weather events in the context of climate change“, which concludes it is now “often possible” to describe how human-induced climate change altered the likelihood and/or intensity of a specific extreme weather event. The report was written by a panel of climate scientists who have studied linkages between climate change and extreme weather, in which I was honored to participate.

One of the questions that motivated this report is: “Did climate change cause this event?” This is a question we hear frequently after devastating instances of extreme weather.

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[Stuart G]

1. K and R... You are absolutely correct

[hamsterjill]

2. Another K & R

I'm in my late 50's and if anyone my age cannot see in his/her own backyard the differences in the seasons, etc. because of climate change, well then, they must be an idiot and a Republican denier.

Of course there is a link between climate change and extreme weather.

[scscholar]

3. Exactly

It's rained here so much the past couple of weeks. So much.