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Climate scientists know the dangers in attributing individual weather phenomena to climate change. They have always been reluctant to say that this year’s floods or last year’s fires resulted directly from global warming. However, in the last decade, a field called extreme event attribution has been growing and maturing.

This is a case where the world is getting to watch science unfold in real-time, and that means that there’s going to be multiple groups looking at the same or different aspects of events, possibly coming to different conclusions, but those don’t necessarily contradict each other.

Now climate scientists are less reluctant to say whether or not a specific bit of weather is the result of climate change.

“One thing we can say for sure: We don’t say ‘one can’t attribute any single event to climate change’ any more.”

Read the linked Scientific American article for a sense of the subtleties and complexities involved in the science of weather and climate.

Source: Climate Change Signal Emerges from the Weather – Scientific American

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