How do scientists know if climate change made a heat wave, extreme storm or wildfire worse?

For years, when extreme weather struck, scientists could say climate change was making such events more likely overall—but pinning its influence on a particular heat wave or hurricane proved much harder. Per the National Academies of Sciences, that's changed. Researchers can now assess whether climate change made a specific event worse, using two main approaches: comparing how often that type of event occurs today versus in a climate without human-caused warming, and measuring how the event's characteristics—rainfall, temperature—were altered by rising temperatures. Scientists are most confident about extreme heat, since the link between greenhouse gases and warming is well understood. Confidence is lower for tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, which depend on small-scale atmospheric processes that climate models still struggle to capture. The science is improving rapidly: better data from satellites and weather stations, more sophisticated models, and research teams now conducting rapid attribution studies within days of major disasters. Hurricane Harvey, for instance, generated research showing climate change increased its rainfall by roughly twenty to thirty-eight percent—and that modest increase led to significantly larger jumps in flooded properties.

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