‘Was this heatwave caused by climate change?’ – we’re asking the wrong question

Climate scientists are pushing back on a question that's echoed through this summer's heatwave coverage. As The Conversation reports, asking 'Did climate change cause this?' is fundamentally the wrong frame. Heatwaves are natural weather events, but climate science reveals something crucial: how much hotter and more dangerous they've become because of greenhouse gas emissions accumulating in the atmosphere. Attribution science makes this concrete. When researchers recreated the conditions of the famous nineteen seventy-six UK heatwave under today's climate, they found peak temperatures three to four degrees Celsius higher. The mechanism is simple: climate change doesn't create heatwaves—it loads the dice, making every heat event hotter, more likely to shatter records, and more damaging to health and infrastructure.

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