A new NOAA report released November 5 looked at how (or how not) climate change affected 28 different global events in 2014. Each study attempts to quantify how much climate change affected the duration, geographic extent, and severity of the weather event in question. But some numbers were easier to crunch than others. For some historically well-recorded events—like heat waves—scientists can quickly and reliably calculate the impact of climate change. Take a rare and complex storm like a tropical cyclone … and, well, things get complicated.
Yesterday, 50 years ago, Lyndon B. Johnson received a warning about the effects of climate change, the first of many issued to US presidents. Since that day, climate study has been focused on the large-scale effects, current and predicted, of greenhouse gases. Those predictions—higher temperatures, stronger storms—are familiar now. But strangely missing was any formalized way to look at climate change in the opposite direction: to identify a particularly nasty weather event and ask whether it was caused by human emissions.
https://www.wired.com/2015/11/climate-change-causes-extreme-weatherbut-not-all-of-it/
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