As long as climate change has been a topic of public discussion, one question has been whether a warming globe makes extreme weather events worse. A new branch of science has emerged in the past few years that finally can offer some answers. Although precise connections between warming trends and extreme weather aren’t completely understood, this growing field of study connects climate change and greater risks of deadly hurricanes, typhoons, rainstorms, wildfires, heat and even cold.

1. What extreme weather is most tied to climate change?

Heat waves are the weather events most directly linked to humanity’s greenhouse gas pollution. And heat, along with drought and wind, fuels forest fires, which is why scientists have become so confident that climate change is making wildfires in the western U.S., Australia and elsewhere much worse. (The U.S. fire season is two months longer than it was in the 1970s and 1980s.) Global warming’s connection to hurricanes, in terms of both frequency and severity, is harder to pin down, given their meteorologically complex nature and how quickly they form and dissipate. But warmer water and moister air -- two results of global warming -- provide added fuel to tropical cyclones and other storms, which are expected to become more intense as the century wears on.

2. How certain is the link?

Carbon Brief, a U.K.-based nonprofit that covers developments in climate science, reviewed studies of more than 400 extreme weather events, the vast majority of them since 2011, to see whether they could be attributed to human-caused climate change. (This field is known as extreme event attribution.) The review found that 70% of the extreme weather events were more likely to occur, or were made more severe, because of global warming.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-01/how-science-links-global-warming-to-extreme-weather-quicktake