It seems recently, at least for the last 10 years or so (2010-2020), whenever there’s a huge, disastrous climate event, a debate ensues and rages for a little while regarding whether climate change was really involved. Maybe it’s just a little hotter than before, maybe this hurricane or flood was a little bigger than the last one or maybe it’s just part of nature that goes through “cycles” so this enormous bushfire is actually normal. No one really remembers the statistics or numbers. Who knows (and who cares) right?

Basically, extreme weather was already a thing before human induced climate change was around. But what climate change does is it increases both the frequency and/or intensity of extreme weather. It may be difficult to quantify exactly how much climate change is involved with our current technology and modelling techniques but we know for sure extreme weather is exacerbated by climate change (and with ever increasing effect as we continually pump out greenhouse gases). This is because all weather events are now occurring in a more energetic climate system, with respect to global warming and all the extra heat Earth is retaining. Think hotter summers, longer droughts, more intense cyclones or hurricanes, larger bushfires and heavier rainfall.

There is a relatively new area of study known as “extreme event attribution” that started in the early 2000s which explores how human effects relate to extreme weather. In these studies, the seemingly pie-in-the-sky concept of climate change is able to be linked with personal and tangible experiences of the weather. Extreme weather events that wreak havoc on a coastline or island nation, for example, no longer become “natural” disasters but rather, human-induced disasters.

*The featured image is of Hurricane Florence as viewed from the International Space Station (ISS). The picture was taken by astronaut Ricky Arnold while aboard the ISS on 10 September 2018. Hurricane Florence caused an estimated $24.2 billion (2018 USD) worth of damage. Image source: NASA.