News outlets have long cited extreme weather events as examples of how greenhouse gas emissions affect the climate. In response, experts typically would emphasize the distinction between weather and climate, warning that any given hurricane or heat wave cannot be attributed to long-term changes in average temperatures. But it turns out that climatologists and meteorologists sometimes can establish such causal relationships.
"First of all, it's important to highlight that every climate extreme weather event has multiple causes," Friederike Otto, an Oxford University climate researcher associated with the World Weather Attribution (WWA) collaboration, told MIT Technology Review in 2020. "So the question of the role of climate change will never be a yes or no question. It will always be, 'Did climate change make it more likely or less likely, or did climate change not play a role?'"
