How Global Warming Fueled Five Extreme Weather Events
To judge whether global warming made a particular extreme weather event more likely to occur, scientists typically compare data from the real world,
where rising greenhouse gases have heated the planet over the past century, against a modeled counterfactual world without those rising emissions.
In some cases, scientists either ruled out or could not find a significant role for climate change, effectively arguing
that a given weather extreme could just as likely have occurred in a world without global warming.
Here are five extreme weather events from 2016 that scientists now think were made more likely by global
warming: Last year, Earth reached its highest temperature on record, beating marks set in 2015 and 2014.
Here, scientists were more measured in putting all the blame on global warming, in part because the impact of El Niño was tough to disentangle: A study led by Sophie C. Lewis of Australian National University concluded
that human greenhouse gas emissions "likely increased the risk of the extreme Great Barrier Reef event" by increasing thermal stress in the ocean.