February 9, 2023

Source: NPR

At global climate talks that just wrapped up, one of the few areas of agreement was about the worldwide toll of climate-driven weather disasters. 

Leaders from Pakistan and Kenya, Senegal and the Bahamas connected the dots between a hotter Earth and devastating floods, storms, heat waves and droughts. And in a speech at the conference, President Joe Biden said more severe hurricanes and wildfires are wreaking havoc in the United States.

That connection between extreme weather and climate change has never been clearer, thanks to an area of science known as extreme-event attribution. It allows scientists to describe exactly how much worse a specific flood, heat wave, hurricane or drought is because of human-caused global warming.

Read more: Climate change is making the weather more severe. Why don’t most forecasts mention it?