Researchers can now explain how climate change is affecting your weather

Katherine Morgan wipes sweat from her forehead while walking to work during a record-breaking heat wave in Portland in 2021. Scientists say that heat wave would have been virtually impossible without human caused climate change. (Nathan Howard/AP)

Nathan Howard / Nathan Howard

Chances are, if you live on Earth, you’ve experienced some strange, or downright dangerous, weather in the last few years. Maybe it was a heat wave that was hotter and longer than you’d ever experienced. Or a thunderstorm that dropped a scary amount of rain. Or a powerful hurricane that seemed to materialize overnight.

Climate change is part of that story. Extreme weather is more likely as the Earth gets hotter. But such sweeping statements can feel impersonal, when really what you want to know is: has climate change affected me?

“You have some extreme weather disaster, and people want to know: Did climate change flood my house? Did climate change make it so hot that my power went out?” says Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies how climate change influences extreme weather. “Those are good questions.”