I often get asked if this or that weather event was caused by climate change. In many cases it is impossible to answer the question directly because it depends on a lot of factors. Dr. Marshall Shepherd discusses this question in his latest blog post at Forbes.com here.
Some events are easier to attribute to changing climate than others. Dr. Shepherd points out that in the baseball steroid era, it was impossible to attribute any single home run to steroids, and yet the number of homers went up dramatically due to extra “heat” on the ball. It is important to remember that there will always be natural fluctuations in weather and climate because that is how the earth-atmosphere-ocean system works, but that does not mean that unnatural changes are not occurring. Or as one of the speakers at the Florida Urban Forestry conference I am attending this week put it, “just because the tides go in and out does not mean the sea level is not rising.”
