The impact of climate change on extreme weather events

The growth in the number of weather disasters — inflation and increased exposure factors aside — has spawned a new branch of climate science called  extreme event attribution. The science does not answer whether climate change caused a particular weather catastrophe, but it can quantify how climate change is affecting the return period of similar events. (Photo: AP)

Climate change has been ongoing since the 1800s.

As the first puffs of fossil-fueled exhaust began rising through the atmosphere, Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish physicist and chemist, was busy estimating the net impact on global temperature from a tripling of CO₂. He didn’t have access to general circulation models or even an electronic calculator, but he still came up with a plausible estimate of a rise in global temperature of 8–9º C.