Can Extreme Weather Events be Attributed to Climate Change?
Today we review a major effort to answer the question: how does climate change affect extreme weather events? This was investigated using two well known approaches: the long term statistics of meteorological parameters and through simulations using physical climate models. Although much more research is needed, several conclusions were made including a main one that some types of extreme weather events (such as extreme cold and heat events) are more easily understood and attributable to climate change than others (such as wildfires and severe convective storms and tornadoes) . This, in turn, is linked to the ability of models to simulate and physically represent large scale temperature events covering continents more effectively than those on an urban or smaller scale that involve fine scale precipitation patterns. Another major finding was that it is impossible to absolutely link climate change alone to a single extreme event because of the role that natural variability almost always plays.
Also an excellent analysis from CMOS:
Changing Extremes Is it real, or just imagined?
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