Extreme rain and floods can trigger claims climate change is to blame. But these claims are not always well founded.
In our new paper in Nature Geoscience, we discuss what can and can’t be attributed to climate change straight after extreme rain events. We use the floods of early 2022 in eastern Australia as a case study.
We know a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, so it would seem reasonable to say climate change makes extreme rain events worse. But this really only applies to short, heavy downpours. For longer duration events, the climate change signal tends to be weaker and more variable.
