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Here is a bit of a 
on extreme weather and climate change, with the goal of clearing up confusion.
on extreme weather and climate change, with the goal of clearing up confusion.
Extreme weather are events that stand out from normal patterns of weather. These events range from tropical storms, like hurricanes to typhoons, to heat waves, to snow and hail storms, to drought and fire.
Global climate change has changed many parts of our planet: we know this from observations, measurement, technology, and research expeditions. The intensification of extreme weather events is one of the most obvious, dangerous, and disruptive aspects of global climate change.
In many cases, extreme weather is not necessarily caused by climate changes, but it is made much worse. Extreme weather is more frequent, more intense, more damaging, and more costly because of climate change.
Climate scientists have long predicted that extreme weather, in the form of temperature warming and changes in the global hydrological cycle, would be a primary symptom of global climate change.
The earth is warming, and the question now is not whether it’s happening, but rather how it is happening. All weather events are now happening against a background of climate warming, and the primary way that climate change is manifested is through extreme weather.
Now, scientists are building new analytical and statistical tools to identify the connection between individual extreme weather events and climate change. Indeed, scientific agencies study and track how climate change is altering the strength and likelihood of extreme weather.
Different weather events are evaluated on an individual basis to understand how climate warming, and its counterparts like warming sea surface temperature, increasing atmospheric moisture content, or sea level rise, contributed to making that individual event worse & more likely.
The detection of climate impacts on extreme weather is often characterized as searching for the “signal within the noise”--the signal here being anthropogenic climate warming, and the noise being the relative short-term chaos of weather.
These kinds of diagnostics allow for scientists to attribute the relative contribution of anthropogenic climate change to each individual storm, flood, fire, or drought.
As extreme weather continues to impact more people and infrastructure, there will be more and more public interest in determining just how much anthropogenic climate change is at fault for each event of extreme weather.
Here the emerging science of event attribution will have significant legal and diplomatic implications. The science of event attribution will become a driver of litigation, as it shifts understanding of what weather is expected and foreseeable.
Event attribution will likely change the lens or perspective that is applied to extreme weather in future legal scenarios.
So, importantly, the projections of early climate scientists that GHG emissions will change the mean and variance of global temperature AND the global hydrological have been proven correct. YAY SCIENCE.
For a LONG time, our focus as a community has been on "if" we see the warming, "can" we detect a signal - and that time is over. Importantly, much of these question were generate bc of ambient political opposition to the basic facts of Earth science.
No longer are we asking "IF" it's happening. It IS happening. Now we want to know how it's happening - and what system contributions (temperature, precip, sea level rise, sea surface temperature) made individual events worse or more likely.
So, when we look at individual events, the attribution of climate in that specific event is constrained by **how well we are observing the system and what historical baseline of variability exists** These are often computational limitations to the statistical detection.
So, our inability to attribute the finger print of climate change is often an artifact of data coverage and observation, NOT because we don't understand the physics and forcing of the system itself.
In any case, this is how I think about (and have been taught to think about) this complex manifestation of climate change. And I welcome feedback if there are better ways of communicating the certainty and uncertainty here.
Importantly, this connection between climate-weather will be incredibly important for all of us - everyone of us - to see and understand and be prepared. So, this conceptual connection, & clarifying this idea in public, will only become more & more relevant as impacts increase.
And, for those of us steeped in these ideas, it becomes very frustrating and predictable to see that the data connecting extreme weather and climate change are OMITTED and ERASED in popular media. This is a miscarriage of public accountability and it is dangerous.
Rather, and repeat after me, every time we have an extreme event the media should say: CLIMATE CHANGE MAKES EVENTS LIKE THESE MORE LIKELY AND MORE INTENSE.
Anyways - thanks for the read. And sending love and concern to all the people in the terrible cold (and dark) across Texas and the southeast.
