Overshadowed by coronavirus, 2020 set a new annual record of 22 billion-dollar weather and climate events in the U.S. - shattering the previous annual record of 16 events that occurred in 2011 and 2017. Source: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/ 

As this Global Weirding episode explains, the question isn't "did climate change cause this event?" Rather, scientists ask "how much worse did climate change make it?" And increasingly, the answer is: "a lot."

Putting a number on how much stronger, more damaging, bigger or more frequent climate change made an event is something climate scientists call "attribution." It's at the cutting edge of our research today, and this fantastic book by @FrediOtto explains: https://greystonebooks.com/products/angry-weather

You'll notice that many of these events were hurricanes. Climate change is affecting hurricanes in many different ways, and parsing out these different factors is both important and complex. I have a thread that explains: https://twitter.com/khayhoe/status/1167851841041981440?lang=en

These impacts are not distributed uniformly across the U.S. or the world. Some locations are already naturally more vulnerable because, like TX, they get so many different types of disasters and have so much valuable infrastructure at risk.

But where ever we live, it's the poor, vulnerable, marginalized and disadvantaged who are disproportionately impacted - right here in North America or on the other side of the world. That's why, at its root, climate change is a justice issue.