Let's start with a couple of the more straightforward connections between global warming and extreme weather events.
Still, some basic physical relationships dictate that the human-induced warming of the oceans and atmosphere has resulted in some changes to atmospheric behavior. So, it's likely that all types of climate change (natural and anthropogenic) on the local, regional, and global scale all affect changing patterns of extreme weather in some way. If that seems confusing, remember that while the world is warming, not all areas are warming equally, and while global sea levels are rising, they're not rising everywhere due to local effects. One thing that has become clear, however, is that changes in extreme weather have varied in differing regions of the globe. These are complex topics, and it should come as no surprise that research relating extreme weather and climate change is very active. The real issues are to what extent extreme weather events are impacted by the warming of the planet (in terms of changes in intensity, frequency, impacts, common area of occurrence, etc.), or whether a certain extreme weather event was made more or less likely because of global warming. So, climate change, by itself, doesn't cause, say, a heatwave here or a flood there. Extreme weather events like blistering heatwaves, powerful thunderstorms, raging floods, and devastating tornadoes and hurricanes all occurred before human activities started influencing the climate on a global scale. Unfortunately, this question often gets posed as "did climate change cause a particular heatwave / flood / drought / storm?" Asked in this way, the answer is "no." Global warming or other aspects of climate change, by themselves, do not cause weather events. The question they're trying to tackle is "how is the warming of the planet affecting the weather?" So, it's important to note that most news stories you see about "climate change" and extreme weather are focusing on one particular aspect of climate change - human-induced global warming. As I hope you've seen throughout this lesson, climate change is a complex, multi-faceted topic, ranging from local human-induced changes to natural and human-induced global-scale changes. The link between climate change and extreme weather gets a lot of attention (see Exhibit A and Exhibit B, as just a couple of examples).
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