How science shows us how warming makes heat waves, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires more likely or more severe — and why this science is becoming a major public-policy battleground.
It seems to me that heat distribution - El Niño / La Niña - is warping the Northern Polar Vortex, causing a geographic shift resulting in distortions of where rain falls, or where tropical cyclones move. Is that too localized or too recent for models to attribute to Global Warming? That is, if 80 Cyclones per year is steady, but they shift in geography by a few hundred miles eastward in the north or westward in the south, due to weeks-long wobbles in the polar vortex, is that a calculable change?
There are indeed several aspects of hurricanes that might change due to climate change. E.g., the latitude of landfall, latitude of peak intensity, translation speed, etc. See section 11.7.1.5 of the last IPCC WG1 report if you're interested in the details.
Whether it’s unprecedented heat waves, unprecedented wildfires due to unprecedented heat waves (e.g. B.C., 2021), far stronger hurricanes, more atmospheric rivers, record-breaking floods, wettest/hottest year on record, off-the-chart poor-air advisories, an exodus of sea life due to warming waters, the mass deforestation and incineration of the Amazonian rainforest, single-use plastics clogging life-bearing waters, a B.C. (2019) midsummer’s snowfall, etcetera — to date there clearly has been pathetically insufficient political courage/will to properly act upon the cause-and-effect of manmade global warming thus climate-change-induced extreme weather events.
I just flashed back to the early 2000s, and the intense frustration I felt reading papers that pondered whether “Mitigation” or “Adaptation” was the better step forward. I felt like screaming at the papers in my hands: “I don’t care which. Do something!” The BP-sponsored Princeton paper, “Wedges” was very current, just as the IPCC Report at the time (#3?) was increasing the certainty level over man made global warming. It was as if we were heading off the cliff and the driver was telling us that the wind would slow us down so we didn’t need to get all “anxious” and slam on the brakes. Guess what part of the Climate funding Republicans left in Biden’s IRA… Carbon Capture!
There is consequential news-media corruption with (non)coverage of other important issues, and which I regularly critique, including (non)coverage of renewable energy and big business destruction or contamination of the natural environment.
Due to our nation’s large fossil fuel extraction/export industry base while bearing a relatively small population, Canada leaves a disproportionately large carbon footprint when compared to most other nations. Yet, our mainstream news-media generally seem to not mind.
For example, I read a particularly disturbing editorial 9 years ago printed by a local newspaper (The Surrey Now-Leader), headlined “Earth Day in need of a facelift”. It opined that “some people would argue that [the day of environmental action] … is an anachronism,” that it should instead be a day of recognizing what we’ve societally accomplished. “And while it [has] served us well, in 2017, do we really need Earth Day anymore?”
[Although it was published that long ago, I find our news-media coverage and commentary have become even less climate concerned since then, especially when it involves our fossil fuel industry.]
Varied lengths of the same editorial, unfortunately, was also run by some sister newspapers (including my community’s newspaper The Peace Arch News), all then owned by a news-media mogul who also aspired to own his own oil refinery.
Until reading this, I had never heard anyone, let alone a mainstream news outlet, suggest we’re doing so well as to render Earth Day an unnecessary "anachronism”. Considering the sorry state of the planet’s natural environment, I still find it one of the most absurd and irresponsible acts of editorial journalism I've witnessed in my 38 years of news consumption.
I’ve submitted a letter (similar to this post) to the editors of both community newspapers every April since that Earth Day, though to no avail and without any response.
Then, on October 7, 2025, a news story was published by the Now-Leader that placed quotation marks around the words “fossil fuel”, as though the phraseology is no longer objective or accurate. For me at least, that’s unprecedented in mainstream journalism. Perhaps the fossil fuel industry now insists upon news media, as well as fossil fuel friendly politicians, always using the euphemism “energy” over the implicitly unflattering “fossil fuel”.
P.S. In an interview with the online National Observer (posted Feb.12, 2019), American intellectual, philosopher, linguist, political activist and social critic Noam Chomsky noted that while the mainstream news-media, including The New York Times, do publish stories about man-made global warming, “It’s as if … there’s a kind of a tunnel vision — the science reporters are occasionally saying ‘look, this is a catastrophe,’ but then the regular [non-environmental pro-fossil fuel] coverage simply disregards it.”
"There is consequential news-media corruption with (non)coverage of other important issues, ... including (non)coverage of renewable energy and big business destruction or contamination of the natural environment."
I think that's undeniable, both historically and presently. Yet I, for one, make distinctions within the broad class of "news-media". In the US, I'm a long-time subscriber to the New York Times and listener to National Public Radio. I observed the NYT's abandonment of journalistic false balance in the 2010s, as it increasingly called out false statements by politicians, including the first Trump administration, in the lead paragraphs of its climate stories. In a company memo in 2016, the NYT's Executive Editor officially declared climate change "the most important story in the world". Climate coverage is now copious on its online front pages, especially of this summer's heat waves. Many of their articles mention the fossil-carbon connection. Commenting on those articles is lively, and overwhelmingly in favor of collective decarbonization.
LOL, I just asked Google Gemini:
"Has National Public Radio ever adopted journalistic false balance, by omission or commission?"
Gemini's reply begins with:
"Yes, National Public Radio has absolutely adopted journalistic false balance in its history, operating through distinct periods of both commission (actively platforming fringe contrarians) and omission (silencing structural climate connections by sidelining specialized beats)."
Whoo boy! I can't argue with a putatively unbiased LLM. As an information consumer, I've got no particular need to defend "news-media", not even NPR. I'm more concerned about social media, where the news is increasingly biased toward parochial populism, anti-intellectualism, conspiracism, and ideological extremism, ruthlessly exploited by the Koch network, Russia, China, Iran etc. To some extent that's true of traditional media, of course. But it's a matter of distinguishing disciplined, professional journalism from motivated propaganda, over a range of sources. One intriguing tool for evaluating media credibility is the "Interactive Media Bias Chart" (adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/). 'Free' for casual personal use, at the cost of frequent invitations to pay for more features until you opt out. Its methodology is published on the site.
Regardless, our credence in any news can only be provisional and fractional. Consider the source and follow the money, always asking *cui bono*. Anyone sufficiently motivated can discover the whole, bitter truth. That too few are motivated, is the bitterest truth of all.
Interesting. ... From both right-wing and left-wing news media in the Far West, too much of ‘journalism’ is motivated more by a paycheck and publication (‘a buck and a byline’) rather than a genuine strive to challenge the big and bad powers that be: To truly comfort the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable in an increasingly unjust global existence.
Mainstream news-media have been editorially emasculated thus negligent, however much it may be due to orders from ownership headquarters and therefore beyond their control.
Such journalism’s traditional function may also be subtly changing. The adage-description of journalism’s fundamental function can remain the same, but revision of terminological representation is definitely in order. While it remains “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” there may be an alteration to what/who constitutes an “afflicted” and “the comfortable”.
Frankly, journalists/editors with genuine integrity should tender their resignations and even publicly proclaim they can no longer help propagate their employer’s media product, whether it involves self-censored or missing coverage of a brutally lopsided foreign war or that of domestic corporate corruption that will harm the populace. Instead, the mainstream news-media's distortion and diversion continues.
Also, over decades I’ve heard of too many cases of employees not standing up and doing what is necessary for the public and/or human(e) good, instead excusing themselves with something like: ‘I need this job — I have a family to support’. I have to say that such familial obligation status does not actually ethically or morally justify their willing involvement — unless, of course, they were actually forced into coupling and copulating with intent to procreate.
What astonishes me, though, is how such news-media professionals can afterwards sleep at night or look their little children/grandchildren in the face everyday?
"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief." -Francis Bacon
There are no good choices in life, only bad or worse.
In terms of political ROI, adaptation has mitigation beat hands down.
Consider: Your city can go to all of the effort and expense to get to zero emissions and you've only reduced the GHG contribution to global warming by a zillionth, whereas adaptation directly protects your local tax base.
Fortunately, there are political upsides to mitigation in the form of, say, moving to electric buses (less noise, less lung pollution, lower maintenance costs), even if no one cares about the greenhouse gas emissions. That is, EVs have their own selling points. The same applies to grid power that doesn't depend on highly variable fuel costs (and is also built faster and is cheaper to maintain).
Good points. But mitigation doesn't necessarily require net expense, if it involves replacing fossil carbon with RE for electrical generation, and ICE municipal vehicles with EVs. Politicians need merely highlight the lower LCOE+ of RE and the much lower lifecycle cost of EVs, to justify the front-loaded cost of replacing existing carbon-powered infrastructure and services. And if public investment in RE and electrification accelerates the downward trend of renewable LCOE+ and consumer electrification, it helps the world get to zero emissions, because we all live in a global marketplace.
This is why so many people (e.g., Bill McKibben, Jigar Shah) want to take advantage of the positives of modern tech and shift away from a guilt and fear narrative that pre-date all of those advances.
This is a brilliant piece that does a phenomenal job of clarifying a complex topic. I immediately wanted to plot a hypothetical probable loss curve under your bell curve shifts to see the expected loss impacts of the shift in the distributions. That would be a real eye opener as those tail risks become more frequent. Would be fascinating to hear more about the impact science that you mentioned.
It's an important question, addressed by the OP. Climate modellers are beavering away at increasing the time and geographic resolution of their projections as I type (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-024-00776-3). Caveat: their data-intensive models increasingly incorporate machine learning, or "A.I."!
This is a brilliant piece that does a phenomenal job of clarifying a complex topic. I immediately wanted to plot a hypothetical probable loss curve under your bell curve shifts to see the expected loss impacts of the shift in the distributions. That would be a real eye opener as those tail risks become more frequent. Would be fascinating to hear more about the impact science that you mentioned. (Reposting this comment to the main thread)
I strongly recommend you examine the chapter on attribution in my book. I'll send you it separately.
Here is an excerpt:
As noted by Trenberth (2012):
“Scientists are frequently asked about an event “Is it caused by climate change?” The answer is that no events are “caused by climate change” or global warming, but all events have a contribution. Moreover, a small shift in the mean can still lead to very large percentage changes in extremes.” “The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.”
Trenberth et al. (2015) went on:
“Here, we suggest that a different framing is desirable, which asks why such extremes unfold the way they do. Specifically, we suggest that it is more useful to regard the extreme circulation regime or weather event as being largely unaffected by climate change, and question whether known changes in the climate system’s thermodynamic state affected the impact of the particular event.”
In attribution studies, changing the null hypothesis from “there is no anthropogenic global warming effect” to one that recognizes the changed environment can completely change the outcome. Because the questions are posed differently, their answers have a different meaning and the conditional approach focuses more on impacts.
You need to split dynamic effects from thermodynamic: precipitation is not well simulated by models.
Check how you treat probabilities of temperatures. You can only talk about probabilities of a temperature between two values. Your treatment of this is technically not correct.
Yes, you are correct. That's why I said, e.g., "... meaning that 17% of days have temperatures around 35°C." The around was intended to mean that it is a range. When writing a textbook for undergrads, you need to think about what concepts are worth forcing them to understand; I decided this was not one of them.
Yea. That's still not quite right. Have a think. I lecture statistics etc. I also lecture climate change. And I always refer to the area under the curve and say what the probability is of days exceeding 30 C etc.
The probability of one particular temperature happening is technically zero. And you can't say the probably of a 38 C day is x%. That's just not correct.
Also from a pedagogical perspective it's important you get the message right. People do easily understand probability as the area under the curve. And it's of course eye opening how fast the area of temps greater than a value grows as the curve shifts right.
Have a think. If you want to publish a book I would make sure you nail these things as otherwise you will be challenged after the fact.
do you think it would be better to say "the frequency of a temperature between 37.5 and 38.5C is 17%"? that was an alternative that I rejected, but could reconsider it.
I would stay away from sentences that talk about the relative likelihood of temperatures and talk about probabilities, which the general public understands. But then you can't talk about a single value and even saying about 35 C is fishy because you need to specify the interval.
I find it most helpful to simply talk about the probability of temperatures exceeding say 35 C, which is the area under the tail. And it is very impressive to show how that area grows exponentially as you shift the mean to the right.
If you say a temperature of say about 35 C has a probability of 17%, that's really confusing the math understanding and people in the general public won't get the "relative frequency" concept. Even students find that difficult to keep right.
Anyhow, just a thought for you to look over the way you use these curves.
Thank you for your insights, Mr. Everth! I agree it's important to nail those things down in a book on weather and climate. And thank you, Prof. Dessler, for being receptive to Mr. Everth's constructive criticism. It really elevates this discussion!
Especially for those people most aware of them, manmade global warming and its resultant increasing number and intensity of climate-change-induced extreme weather events rightfully stir up alarm. Perhaps even for many of those people who purportedly distrust thus dislike climate science.
Yet, increasingly problematic is the very large and growing populace who are too overworked, worried and even angry about food and housing unaffordability for themselves or their family — all while on insufficient income — to criticize the fossil fuel industry, etcetera, for environmental damage their policies cause/allow, particularly when not immediately observable.
It does seem convenient for such very-profitable mega polluters, however.
There’s a continuance of polluting the natural environment with a business as usual attitude. Societally, we still discharge out of elevated exhaust pipes, smoke stacks and, quite consequentially, from sky-high jet engines like it’s all absorbed into the natural environment without repercussion. Out of sight, out of mind.
"There’s a continuance of polluting the natural environment with a business as usual attitude. Societally, we still discharge out of elevated exhaust pipes, smoke stacks and, quite consequentially, from sky-high jet engines like it’s all absorbed into the natural environment without repercussion. Out of sight, out of mind."
Yes. That's a succinct description of the class of problem Economics calls "The Tragedy of the Commons" (G. Hardin). It's an inevitable result of the ancient 'free' market's relentless propensity to socialize every cost it can get away with out of the highest price the traffic will bear, leaving those unaccounted costs to involuntary 3rd parties to pay with their homes, livelihoods and lives, far out of proportion to their own contributions to the problem.
"Political Science" (quote-marks because the name is superficially oxymoronic) calls anthropogenic global warming a "collective-action problem" (quote-marks merely syntactic), and interrogates the immense social power of carbon capital, whose annual profit is in the hundreds of billions, as the primary obstacle to collective action to decarbonize our economies. What Is To Be Done? A historic query! The answer is that only Hardin's "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" can mitigate the otherwise open-ended tragedy of the climate commons. For those who cite E. Ostrom in opposition to Hardin, even she agreed capping global warming will require mutual coercion on national and international scales: carbon pricing, public investment in RE, or even command-and-control regulations. Resolute anti-collectivists should note: simply investing 'coerced' (i.e. taxed) public funds to drive down the LCOE+ of renewable electricity until nobody buys fossil fuels anymore because RE is cheaper isn't Communism, it's just mutual self-preservation!
It is factually correct that temperatures exceeding 100°F have occurred across all states historically, with notable spikes during the early 20th century, particularly in the 1930s. However, focusing solely on whether such thresholds have been reached overlooks the more critical dimension: the frequency, duration, and geographic scale of heat events. Modern climate data indicates that heat waves today are not just isolated incidents but are increasingly prolonged, synchronized across regions, and accompanied by higher nighttime temperatures, amplifying their economic and public health impact. For decision-makers, the issue is not about validating or dismissing past extremes, but understanding how systemic risk is evolving. The strategic priority should therefore shift from debating historical comparisons to building resilience against intensifying heat patterns, investing in adaptive infrastructure, and ensuring energy systems can withstand sustained demand surges. In this context, the discussion is not about fear or narrative framing, but about forward-looking risk management in an environment of increasing climate volatility.
"there is no robust theory explaining how the total number of tropical cyclones will change as the climate warms"
----
IIRC, theory had forecast no increase in the ·number· of TCs, but that those that survived the active atmosphere (especially wind shear) would more likely be majors. (I called it the "Nietzsche Theory".) I believe that trend has been observed.
And, of course, Kerry Emmanuel showed that just adding more ocean heat would make a cyclone potentially more powerful.
This is excellent. People who don’t want to see the extreme within the ordinary see only the ordinary. Like seeing mostly kimberlite and assuming there are no diamonds. Of course as time progresses and climate change becomes a larger factor in storms peoples obstinance will insist a vein of mostly diamonds is in fact 100% kimberlite. Forget reason, people need to get scared.
I remember some years ago, climate sceptic Andrew Neil, then hosting the BBC's leading politics show, interviewed Robert May, former president of the Royal Society, about climate change. Neil, citing an IPCC report, questioned whether any particular extreme weather event could scientifically be attributed to global warming. May referred to the case of a baseball player in the US who became famous for hitting home runs but was later found to be taking performance-enhancing steroids (I think he must have been referring to Alex Rodriguez). He told Neil that any one individual home run was just that, a home run, but when considering the hundreds of home runs Rodriguez hit during his career while under the influence, so to speak, that was clearly the result of the steroids. He told Neil that what we were experiencing was the weather on steroids. When Neil referred again to the passage he selectively quoted from the IPCC report, May shut him down saying that his analogy was 'apt'. It wasn't often one saw the garrulous, self-opinionated Neil shut down so emphatically on his own show and he had the good sense not to press the issue further.
I was left feeling I could never again complain about the weather being too cold after having suffered the unprecedented heatwave here in late June 2021, described by meteorologists as a ‘stalling dome’ of high heat, that resulted in 619 confirmed heat-related deaths.
According to AI Overview (on June 25, 2026): “The late June 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave was caused by an atmospheric 'heat dome'—a persistent, high-pressure ridge that trapped hot air over the region like a lid. This stalling system shattered regional temperature records, with Lytton, B.C. reaching an all-time Canadian high of 49.6 C.”
I didn't have a proper air conditioner back then; I only had a weaker system of temperature moderation known as evaporative cooling.
Then most of the province, including southwestern B.C., suffered some unprecedently cold days during the following January, which was described by meteorologists as a ‘stalling dome’ of freezing cold.
I doubt those extremes were just coincidental; rather, they are basically due to climate change via human-caused global warming via morbidly massive amounts of fossil fuel consumption ever since the Industrial Revolution.
Aw, I was having fun 8^D. But seriously, thank you! Sasha's cognitive motivations for obstructing decarbonization are puzzling, but their existence is manifest in his generic denialism.
You doubt those extremes were just coincidental but you don't doubt that they were cause by GW. That's very scientific. Even Andrew didn't support the second half of your assumption.
But I'm happy that you have both proper AC and heating systems now. By using them you probably contribute more to CO2 emissions. Does it bother you?
Nah. Everybody here is connected to the global marketplace, so every good or service we buy carries a climate cost. I'm not willing to go entirely off grid. How about you?
I do vote for candidates who support collectively taking the profit out of selling fossil fuels, by public investment in driving down the LCOE+ of renewable, storable, portable electricity, until nobody wants to socialize their private carbon emissions anymore because carbon-neutral electricity is cheaper for every purpose. Everybody but carbon capitalists wins! The principle obstacle is that carbon capital can buy a lot of collective inaction.
"In late June 2021 a heatwave of unprecedented magnitude impacted the Pacific Northwest region of Canada and the United States. Many locations broke all-time maximum temperature records by more than 5 °C, and the Canadian national temperature record was broken by 4.6 °C, with a new record temperature of 49.6 °C. Here, we provide a comprehensive summary of this event and its impacts. Upstream diabatic heating played a key role in the magnitude of this anomaly. Weather forecasts provided advanced notice of the event, while sub-seasonal forecasts showed an increased likelihood of a heat extreme with lead times of 10-20 days. The impacts of this event were catastrophic, including hundreds of attributable deaths across the Pacific Northwest, mass-mortalities of marine life, reduced crop and fruit yields, river flooding from rapid snow and glacier melt, and a substantial increase in wildfires—the latter contributing to landslides in the months following. These impacts provide examples we can learn from and a vivid depiction of how climate change can be so devastating."
Notice the authors' willingness to call the impact of climate change not just "devastating" but "catastrophic"!
Thanks so much for this. I feel my fragmented thoughts on this topic have been pieced together. What would your push back be on those who reference the challenge of comparing very local events with global phenomenon? Or how only empirical data is robust enough?
For me the physics itself is convincing enough but would love to hear your thoughts on the above.
Whether the data are sufficiently certain for society to take action is not a scientific question but really a value judgement. After all, there's no scientific test you can use to determine that "The science is certain enough to take action on climate change." So I would just point that out. The science is sufficient for some people but will never be certain enough for others.
Thanks I'm genuinely curious what your responses are to those questions. I ask because i think it's important we convince more and more people with better evidence, answers and communication. Exactly like your article has done. Of course there are lots of people who will never have enough evidence but i think there are many many more on the fence.
For the record i see it as a risk assessment, and i think waiting for empirical data to show a trend so we can act only then is far riskier than taking action today..even in the event its not as bad as we think. The question then becomes how much "action" are we willing to take and who will pay for the expensive bits like industrial decarbonisation and cdr.
Accepting is one thing, accepting that it will come at a cost today is maybe the biggest challenge for the non scientific community to accept. Do you have any thoughts on how we can communicate those timelines better.
If you're asking about my personal opinion, here is what I tell people: climate change is a significant risk for human and natural systems that we care about. Solving climate change by reducing emissions by shifting our economy to use climate-safe renewable energy will actually be quite cheap (in fact, if you count externalities, it will probably have negative costs). The reason we're not is because of the power of fossil fuel interests. Thus, climate change is really a political problem, not a scientific or technical one.
Thus, when I talk to general audiences, I don't lean on the climate data. You need a bit of it to establish the risk, but I would rather tell them about the good news that cheap renewable energy is so cheap that we can solve this problem at a very low cost.
Thank you for confronting the ultimate cause of continued open-ended global warming directly, Prof. Dessler. The sooner we all do, the lower the final, cumulative net cost of anthropogenic global warming will be.
Thanks very much for engaging with me on this. And apologies if I've diverted a bit. Your article, as already mentioned, is maybe the best short piece I've read on this topic.
It's all about excited molecules. The heat 🥵 makes them want to party to cool off. Any storm is a molecular party. The music is blasting loud with climate change.
You note that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor but that warmer temperatures also produce a drier atmosphere. You might want to elaborate as some readers might interpret these as contradictory statements. (Also thank you for this great explanation of the science!)
Yes, that's a mistake. I've edited the text to clarify. Thanks for pointing this out. No matter how many times you read it, some mistakes will get by you.
Excellent blog, as ever Andrew, thank you. One thing that I would like to understand better is whether the science predicts that the bell curve not only shifts to the right as the climate warms, but also flattens out, making the extremes more likely and the 'normal' temperatures slightly less likely. This is seen in the Houston graph, but you don't explain if that is also predicted or just a statistical phenomenon. All the best, and many thanks again.
Aha. "Changes in the variance of simulated temperatures are equivocal, with the sign and magnitude of variance changes in the 21st century varying in different models and regions." Not just the magnitude but the *sign* as well. Who'd think that?
So, why did you tell me that the scientific community disagrees with me. At least these authors very much agree.
"Aha"? You're grasping at straws. You found a single metric, regional temperature variance, where models show divergence. You may have a few trivial points of agreement with "the scientific community", but the consensus disagrees with your generic climate-science denial! Why are you even here, but to obstruct collective intervention in carbon capital profits?
This is an excellent chapter, thank you.
It seems to me that heat distribution - El Niño / La Niña - is warping the Northern Polar Vortex, causing a geographic shift resulting in distortions of where rain falls, or where tropical cyclones move. Is that too localized or too recent for models to attribute to Global Warming? That is, if 80 Cyclones per year is steady, but they shift in geography by a few hundred miles eastward in the north or westward in the south, due to weeks-long wobbles in the polar vortex, is that a calculable change?
There are indeed several aspects of hurricanes that might change due to climate change. E.g., the latitude of landfall, latitude of peak intensity, translation speed, etc. See section 11.7.1.5 of the last IPCC WG1 report if you're interested in the details.
Thank you. 🙏 There are lots of moving parts to this. 🤔
Whether it’s unprecedented heat waves, unprecedented wildfires due to unprecedented heat waves (e.g. B.C., 2021), far stronger hurricanes, more atmospheric rivers, record-breaking floods, wettest/hottest year on record, off-the-chart poor-air advisories, an exodus of sea life due to warming waters, the mass deforestation and incineration of the Amazonian rainforest, single-use plastics clogging life-bearing waters, a B.C. (2019) midsummer’s snowfall, etcetera — to date there clearly has been pathetically insufficient political courage/will to properly act upon the cause-and-effect of manmade global warming thus climate-change-induced extreme weather events.
I just flashed back to the early 2000s, and the intense frustration I felt reading papers that pondered whether “Mitigation” or “Adaptation” was the better step forward. I felt like screaming at the papers in my hands: “I don’t care which. Do something!” The BP-sponsored Princeton paper, “Wedges” was very current, just as the IPCC Report at the time (#3?) was increasing the certainty level over man made global warming. It was as if we were heading off the cliff and the driver was telling us that the wind would slow us down so we didn’t need to get all “anxious” and slam on the brakes. Guess what part of the Climate funding Republicans left in Biden’s IRA… Carbon Capture!
There is consequential news-media corruption with (non)coverage of other important issues, and which I regularly critique, including (non)coverage of renewable energy and big business destruction or contamination of the natural environment.
Due to our nation’s large fossil fuel extraction/export industry base while bearing a relatively small population, Canada leaves a disproportionately large carbon footprint when compared to most other nations. Yet, our mainstream news-media generally seem to not mind.
For example, I read a particularly disturbing editorial 9 years ago printed by a local newspaper (The Surrey Now-Leader), headlined “Earth Day in need of a facelift”. It opined that “some people would argue that [the day of environmental action] … is an anachronism,” that it should instead be a day of recognizing what we’ve societally accomplished. “And while it [has] served us well, in 2017, do we really need Earth Day anymore?”
[Although it was published that long ago, I find our news-media coverage and commentary have become even less climate concerned since then, especially when it involves our fossil fuel industry.]
Varied lengths of the same editorial, unfortunately, was also run by some sister newspapers (including my community’s newspaper The Peace Arch News), all then owned by a news-media mogul who also aspired to own his own oil refinery.
Until reading this, I had never heard anyone, let alone a mainstream news outlet, suggest we’re doing so well as to render Earth Day an unnecessary "anachronism”. Considering the sorry state of the planet’s natural environment, I still find it one of the most absurd and irresponsible acts of editorial journalism I've witnessed in my 38 years of news consumption.
I’ve submitted a letter (similar to this post) to the editors of both community newspapers every April since that Earth Day, though to no avail and without any response.
Then, on October 7, 2025, a news story was published by the Now-Leader that placed quotation marks around the words “fossil fuel”, as though the phraseology is no longer objective or accurate. For me at least, that’s unprecedented in mainstream journalism. Perhaps the fossil fuel industry now insists upon news media, as well as fossil fuel friendly politicians, always using the euphemism “energy” over the implicitly unflattering “fossil fuel”.
P.S. In an interview with the online National Observer (posted Feb.12, 2019), American intellectual, philosopher, linguist, political activist and social critic Noam Chomsky noted that while the mainstream news-media, including The New York Times, do publish stories about man-made global warming, “It’s as if … there’s a kind of a tunnel vision — the science reporters are occasionally saying ‘look, this is a catastrophe,’ but then the regular [non-environmental pro-fossil fuel] coverage simply disregards it.”
"There is consequential news-media corruption with (non)coverage of other important issues, ... including (non)coverage of renewable energy and big business destruction or contamination of the natural environment."
I think that's undeniable, both historically and presently. Yet I, for one, make distinctions within the broad class of "news-media". In the US, I'm a long-time subscriber to the New York Times and listener to National Public Radio. I observed the NYT's abandonment of journalistic false balance in the 2010s, as it increasingly called out false statements by politicians, including the first Trump administration, in the lead paragraphs of its climate stories. In a company memo in 2016, the NYT's Executive Editor officially declared climate change "the most important story in the world". Climate coverage is now copious on its online front pages, especially of this summer's heat waves. Many of their articles mention the fossil-carbon connection. Commenting on those articles is lively, and overwhelmingly in favor of collective decarbonization.
LOL, I just asked Google Gemini:
"Has National Public Radio ever adopted journalistic false balance, by omission or commission?"
Gemini's reply begins with:
"Yes, National Public Radio has absolutely adopted journalistic false balance in its history, operating through distinct periods of both commission (actively platforming fringe contrarians) and omission (silencing structural climate connections by sidelining specialized beats)."
Whoo boy! I can't argue with a putatively unbiased LLM. As an information consumer, I've got no particular need to defend "news-media", not even NPR. I'm more concerned about social media, where the news is increasingly biased toward parochial populism, anti-intellectualism, conspiracism, and ideological extremism, ruthlessly exploited by the Koch network, Russia, China, Iran etc. To some extent that's true of traditional media, of course. But it's a matter of distinguishing disciplined, professional journalism from motivated propaganda, over a range of sources. One intriguing tool for evaluating media credibility is the "Interactive Media Bias Chart" (adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/). 'Free' for casual personal use, at the cost of frequent invitations to pay for more features until you opt out. Its methodology is published on the site.
Regardless, our credence in any news can only be provisional and fractional. Consider the source and follow the money, always asking *cui bono*. Anyone sufficiently motivated can discover the whole, bitter truth. That too few are motivated, is the bitterest truth of all.
Interesting. ... From both right-wing and left-wing news media in the Far West, too much of ‘journalism’ is motivated more by a paycheck and publication (‘a buck and a byline’) rather than a genuine strive to challenge the big and bad powers that be: To truly comfort the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable in an increasingly unjust global existence.
Mainstream news-media have been editorially emasculated thus negligent, however much it may be due to orders from ownership headquarters and therefore beyond their control.
Such journalism’s traditional function may also be subtly changing. The adage-description of journalism’s fundamental function can remain the same, but revision of terminological representation is definitely in order. While it remains “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” there may be an alteration to what/who constitutes an “afflicted” and “the comfortable”.
Frankly, journalists/editors with genuine integrity should tender their resignations and even publicly proclaim they can no longer help propagate their employer’s media product, whether it involves self-censored or missing coverage of a brutally lopsided foreign war or that of domestic corporate corruption that will harm the populace. Instead, the mainstream news-media's distortion and diversion continues.
Also, over decades I’ve heard of too many cases of employees not standing up and doing what is necessary for the public and/or human(e) good, instead excusing themselves with something like: ‘I need this job — I have a family to support’. I have to say that such familial obligation status does not actually ethically or morally justify their willing involvement — unless, of course, they were actually forced into coupling and copulating with intent to procreate.
What astonishes me, though, is how such news-media professionals can afterwards sleep at night or look their little children/grandchildren in the face everyday?
"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief." -Francis Bacon
There are no good choices in life, only bad or worse.
In terms of political ROI, adaptation has mitigation beat hands down.
Consider: Your city can go to all of the effort and expense to get to zero emissions and you've only reduced the GHG contribution to global warming by a zillionth, whereas adaptation directly protects your local tax base.
Fortunately, there are political upsides to mitigation in the form of, say, moving to electric buses (less noise, less lung pollution, lower maintenance costs), even if no one cares about the greenhouse gas emissions. That is, EVs have their own selling points. The same applies to grid power that doesn't depend on highly variable fuel costs (and is also built faster and is cheaper to maintain).
Good points. But mitigation doesn't necessarily require net expense, if it involves replacing fossil carbon with RE for electrical generation, and ICE municipal vehicles with EVs. Politicians need merely highlight the lower LCOE+ of RE and the much lower lifecycle cost of EVs, to justify the front-loaded cost of replacing existing carbon-powered infrastructure and services. And if public investment in RE and electrification accelerates the downward trend of renewable LCOE+ and consumer electrification, it helps the world get to zero emissions, because we all live in a global marketplace.
This is why so many people (e.g., Bill McKibben, Jigar Shah) want to take advantage of the positives of modern tech and shift away from a guilt and fear narrative that pre-date all of those advances.
This is a brilliant piece that does a phenomenal job of clarifying a complex topic. I immediately wanted to plot a hypothetical probable loss curve under your bell curve shifts to see the expected loss impacts of the shift in the distributions. That would be a real eye opener as those tail risks become more frequent. Would be fascinating to hear more about the impact science that you mentioned.
A very important question is how much these events will increase in the next years.
What temperatures will heatwaves reach, how many streets will be flooded. I keep looking for it.
It's an important question, addressed by the OP. Climate modellers are beavering away at increasing the time and geographic resolution of their projections as I type (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-024-00776-3). Caveat: their data-intensive models increasingly incorporate machine learning, or "A.I."!
This is a brilliant piece that does a phenomenal job of clarifying a complex topic. I immediately wanted to plot a hypothetical probable loss curve under your bell curve shifts to see the expected loss impacts of the shift in the distributions. That would be a real eye opener as those tail risks become more frequent. Would be fascinating to hear more about the impact science that you mentioned. (Reposting this comment to the main thread)
Very important information as wild weather increases and damages accelerate
Excellent writeup. Thank you.
Andrew
I strongly recommend you examine the chapter on attribution in my book. I'll send you it separately.
Here is an excerpt:
As noted by Trenberth (2012):
“Scientists are frequently asked about an event “Is it caused by climate change?” The answer is that no events are “caused by climate change” or global warming, but all events have a contribution. Moreover, a small shift in the mean can still lead to very large percentage changes in extremes.” “The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.”
Trenberth et al. (2015) went on:
“Here, we suggest that a different framing is desirable, which asks why such extremes unfold the way they do. Specifically, we suggest that it is more useful to regard the extreme circulation regime or weather event as being largely unaffected by climate change, and question whether known changes in the climate system’s thermodynamic state affected the impact of the particular event.”
In attribution studies, changing the null hypothesis from “there is no anthropogenic global warming effect” to one that recognizes the changed environment can completely change the outcome. Because the questions are posed differently, their answers have a different meaning and the conditional approach focuses more on impacts.
You need to split dynamic effects from thermodynamic: precipitation is not well simulated by models.
Cheers
Kevin
Thanks, Kevin, please send it and I'll definitely take a look.
Check how you treat probabilities of temperatures. You can only talk about probabilities of a temperature between two values. Your treatment of this is technically not correct.
https://youtu.be/gHBL5Zau3NE
Yes, you are correct. That's why I said, e.g., "... meaning that 17% of days have temperatures around 35°C." The around was intended to mean that it is a range. When writing a textbook for undergrads, you need to think about what concepts are worth forcing them to understand; I decided this was not one of them.
Yea. That's still not quite right. Have a think. I lecture statistics etc. I also lecture climate change. And I always refer to the area under the curve and say what the probability is of days exceeding 30 C etc.
The probability of one particular temperature happening is technically zero. And you can't say the probably of a 38 C day is x%. That's just not correct.
Also from a pedagogical perspective it's important you get the message right. People do easily understand probability as the area under the curve. And it's of course eye opening how fast the area of temps greater than a value grows as the curve shifts right.
Have a think. If you want to publish a book I would make sure you nail these things as otherwise you will be challenged after the fact.
do you think it would be better to say "the frequency of a temperature between 37.5 and 38.5C is 17%"? that was an alternative that I rejected, but could reconsider it.
I would stay away from sentences that talk about the relative likelihood of temperatures and talk about probabilities, which the general public understands. But then you can't talk about a single value and even saying about 35 C is fishy because you need to specify the interval.
I find it most helpful to simply talk about the probability of temperatures exceeding say 35 C, which is the area under the tail. And it is very impressive to show how that area grows exponentially as you shift the mean to the right.
If you say a temperature of say about 35 C has a probability of 17%, that's really confusing the math understanding and people in the general public won't get the "relative frequency" concept. Even students find that difficult to keep right.
Anyhow, just a thought for you to look over the way you use these curves.
that's a good suggestion to consider. thanks for your comments.
Thank you for your insights, Mr. Everth! I agree it's important to nail those things down in a book on weather and climate. And thank you, Prof. Dessler, for being receptive to Mr. Everth's constructive criticism. It really elevates this discussion!
Especially for those people most aware of them, manmade global warming and its resultant increasing number and intensity of climate-change-induced extreme weather events rightfully stir up alarm. Perhaps even for many of those people who purportedly distrust thus dislike climate science.
Yet, increasingly problematic is the very large and growing populace who are too overworked, worried and even angry about food and housing unaffordability for themselves or their family — all while on insufficient income — to criticize the fossil fuel industry, etcetera, for environmental damage their policies cause/allow, particularly when not immediately observable.
It does seem convenient for such very-profitable mega polluters, however.
There’s a continuance of polluting the natural environment with a business as usual attitude. Societally, we still discharge out of elevated exhaust pipes, smoke stacks and, quite consequentially, from sky-high jet engines like it’s all absorbed into the natural environment without repercussion. Out of sight, out of mind.
"There’s a continuance of polluting the natural environment with a business as usual attitude. Societally, we still discharge out of elevated exhaust pipes, smoke stacks and, quite consequentially, from sky-high jet engines like it’s all absorbed into the natural environment without repercussion. Out of sight, out of mind."
Yes. That's a succinct description of the class of problem Economics calls "The Tragedy of the Commons" (G. Hardin). It's an inevitable result of the ancient 'free' market's relentless propensity to socialize every cost it can get away with out of the highest price the traffic will bear, leaving those unaccounted costs to involuntary 3rd parties to pay with their homes, livelihoods and lives, far out of proportion to their own contributions to the problem.
"Political Science" (quote-marks because the name is superficially oxymoronic) calls anthropogenic global warming a "collective-action problem" (quote-marks merely syntactic), and interrogates the immense social power of carbon capital, whose annual profit is in the hundreds of billions, as the primary obstacle to collective action to decarbonize our economies. What Is To Be Done? A historic query! The answer is that only Hardin's "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" can mitigate the otherwise open-ended tragedy of the climate commons. For those who cite E. Ostrom in opposition to Hardin, even she agreed capping global warming will require mutual coercion on national and international scales: carbon pricing, public investment in RE, or even command-and-control regulations. Resolute anti-collectivists should note: simply investing 'coerced' (i.e. taxed) public funds to drive down the LCOE+ of renewable electricity until nobody buys fossil fuels anymore because RE is cheaper isn't Communism, it's just mutual self-preservation!
Well said, and powerfully. I can read the frustration, and I share in it.
It is factually correct that temperatures exceeding 100°F have occurred across all states historically, with notable spikes during the early 20th century, particularly in the 1930s. However, focusing solely on whether such thresholds have been reached overlooks the more critical dimension: the frequency, duration, and geographic scale of heat events. Modern climate data indicates that heat waves today are not just isolated incidents but are increasingly prolonged, synchronized across regions, and accompanied by higher nighttime temperatures, amplifying their economic and public health impact. For decision-makers, the issue is not about validating or dismissing past extremes, but understanding how systemic risk is evolving. The strategic priority should therefore shift from debating historical comparisons to building resilience against intensifying heat patterns, investing in adaptive infrastructure, and ensuring energy systems can withstand sustained demand surges. In this context, the discussion is not about fear or narrative framing, but about forward-looking risk management in an environment of increasing climate volatility.
"there is no robust theory explaining how the total number of tropical cyclones will change as the climate warms"
----
IIRC, theory had forecast no increase in the ·number· of TCs, but that those that survived the active atmosphere (especially wind shear) would more likely be majors. (I called it the "Nietzsche Theory".) I believe that trend has been observed.
And, of course, Kerry Emmanuel showed that just adding more ocean heat would make a cyclone potentially more powerful.
This is excellent. People who don’t want to see the extreme within the ordinary see only the ordinary. Like seeing mostly kimberlite and assuming there are no diamonds. Of course as time progresses and climate change becomes a larger factor in storms peoples obstinance will insist a vein of mostly diamonds is in fact 100% kimberlite. Forget reason, people need to get scared.
Like all metaphors, climate-and-kimberlite is limited. Thanks for your unique perspective, though!
I remember some years ago, climate sceptic Andrew Neil, then hosting the BBC's leading politics show, interviewed Robert May, former president of the Royal Society, about climate change. Neil, citing an IPCC report, questioned whether any particular extreme weather event could scientifically be attributed to global warming. May referred to the case of a baseball player in the US who became famous for hitting home runs but was later found to be taking performance-enhancing steroids (I think he must have been referring to Alex Rodriguez). He told Neil that any one individual home run was just that, a home run, but when considering the hundreds of home runs Rodriguez hit during his career while under the influence, so to speak, that was clearly the result of the steroids. He told Neil that what we were experiencing was the weather on steroids. When Neil referred again to the passage he selectively quoted from the IPCC report, May shut him down saying that his analogy was 'apt'. It wasn't often one saw the garrulous, self-opinionated Neil shut down so emphatically on his own show and he had the good sense not to press the issue further.
I was left feeling I could never again complain about the weather being too cold after having suffered the unprecedented heatwave here in late June 2021, described by meteorologists as a ‘stalling dome’ of high heat, that resulted in 619 confirmed heat-related deaths.
According to AI Overview (on June 25, 2026): “The late June 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave was caused by an atmospheric 'heat dome'—a persistent, high-pressure ridge that trapped hot air over the region like a lid. This stalling system shattered regional temperature records, with Lytton, B.C. reaching an all-time Canadian high of 49.6 C.”
I didn't have a proper air conditioner back then; I only had a weaker system of temperature moderation known as evaporative cooling.
Then most of the province, including southwestern B.C., suffered some unprecedently cold days during the following January, which was described by meteorologists as a ‘stalling dome’ of freezing cold.
I doubt those extremes were just coincidental; rather, they are basically due to climate change via human-caused global warming via morbidly massive amounts of fossil fuel consumption ever since the Industrial Revolution.
I think it's safe to assume that climate change plays a role in every heatwave that occurs.
the generic climate denial you espouse is just not welcome here. time for a cooling off period.
Aw, I was having fun 8^D. But seriously, thank you! Sasha's cognitive motivations for obstructing decarbonization are puzzling, but their existence is manifest in his generic denialism.
Well, Cliff Mass said in 2024 (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-real-story-of-2021-northwest.html):
"The bottom line: natural variability was the key cause of the heat wave, with human-caused global warming playing only a small role."
I think he's overlooking the Bayesian prior probability.
You doubt those extremes were just coincidental but you don't doubt that they were cause by GW. That's very scientific. Even Andrew didn't support the second half of your assumption.
But I'm happy that you have both proper AC and heating systems now. By using them you probably contribute more to CO2 emissions. Does it bother you?
Nah. Everybody here is connected to the global marketplace, so every good or service we buy carries a climate cost. I'm not willing to go entirely off grid. How about you?
I do vote for candidates who support collectively taking the profit out of selling fossil fuels, by public investment in driving down the LCOE+ of renewable, storable, portable electricity, until nobody wants to socialize their private carbon emissions anymore because carbon-neutral electricity is cheaper for every purpose. Everybody but carbon capitalists wins! The principle obstacle is that carbon capital can buy a lot of collective inaction.
Here's what the abstract of one peer-reviewed attribution study said (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36289-3):
"In late June 2021 a heatwave of unprecedented magnitude impacted the Pacific Northwest region of Canada and the United States. Many locations broke all-time maximum temperature records by more than 5 °C, and the Canadian national temperature record was broken by 4.6 °C, with a new record temperature of 49.6 °C. Here, we provide a comprehensive summary of this event and its impacts. Upstream diabatic heating played a key role in the magnitude of this anomaly. Weather forecasts provided advanced notice of the event, while sub-seasonal forecasts showed an increased likelihood of a heat extreme with lead times of 10-20 days. The impacts of this event were catastrophic, including hundreds of attributable deaths across the Pacific Northwest, mass-mortalities of marine life, reduced crop and fruit yields, river flooding from rapid snow and glacier melt, and a substantial increase in wildfires—the latter contributing to landslides in the months following. These impacts provide examples we can learn from and a vivid depiction of how climate change can be so devastating."
Notice the authors' willingness to call the impact of climate change not just "devastating" but "catastrophic"!
Thanks so much for this. I feel my fragmented thoughts on this topic have been pieced together. What would your push back be on those who reference the challenge of comparing very local events with global phenomenon? Or how only empirical data is robust enough?
For me the physics itself is convincing enough but would love to hear your thoughts on the above.
Whether the data are sufficiently certain for society to take action is not a scientific question but really a value judgement. After all, there's no scientific test you can use to determine that "The science is certain enough to take action on climate change." So I would just point that out. The science is sufficient for some people but will never be certain enough for others.
Thanks I'm genuinely curious what your responses are to those questions. I ask because i think it's important we convince more and more people with better evidence, answers and communication. Exactly like your article has done. Of course there are lots of people who will never have enough evidence but i think there are many many more on the fence.
For the record i see it as a risk assessment, and i think waiting for empirical data to show a trend so we can act only then is far riskier than taking action today..even in the event its not as bad as we think. The question then becomes how much "action" are we willing to take and who will pay for the expensive bits like industrial decarbonisation and cdr.
Accepting is one thing, accepting that it will come at a cost today is maybe the biggest challenge for the non scientific community to accept. Do you have any thoughts on how we can communicate those timelines better.
If you're asking about my personal opinion, here is what I tell people: climate change is a significant risk for human and natural systems that we care about. Solving climate change by reducing emissions by shifting our economy to use climate-safe renewable energy will actually be quite cheap (in fact, if you count externalities, it will probably have negative costs). The reason we're not is because of the power of fossil fuel interests. Thus, climate change is really a political problem, not a scientific or technical one.
Thus, when I talk to general audiences, I don't lean on the climate data. You need a bit of it to establish the risk, but I would rather tell them about the good news that cheap renewable energy is so cheap that we can solve this problem at a very low cost.
Thank you for confronting the ultimate cause of continued open-ended global warming directly, Prof. Dessler. The sooner we all do, the lower the final, cumulative net cost of anthropogenic global warming will be.
Thanks very much for engaging with me on this. And apologies if I've diverted a bit. Your article, as already mentioned, is maybe the best short piece I've read on this topic.
It's all about excited molecules. The heat 🥵 makes them want to party to cool off. Any storm is a molecular party. The music is blasting loud with climate change.
Dr Sheinstein
You note that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor but that warmer temperatures also produce a drier atmosphere. You might want to elaborate as some readers might interpret these as contradictory statements. (Also thank you for this great explanation of the science!)
Yes, that's a mistake. I've edited the text to clarify. Thanks for pointing this out. No matter how many times you read it, some mistakes will get by you.
Excellent blog, as ever Andrew, thank you. One thing that I would like to understand better is whether the science predicts that the bell curve not only shifts to the right as the climate warms, but also flattens out, making the extremes more likely and the 'normal' temperatures slightly less likely. This is seen in the Houston graph, but you don't explain if that is also predicted or just a statistical phenomenon. All the best, and many thanks again.
The evidence on changes in the shape of the distribution are equivocal, e.g., https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2016jd025292 or https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212094716300512.
Aha. "Changes in the variance of simulated temperatures are equivocal, with the sign and magnitude of variance changes in the 21st century varying in different models and regions." Not just the magnitude but the *sign* as well. Who'd think that?
So, why did you tell me that the scientific community disagrees with me. At least these authors very much agree.
"Aha"? You're grasping at straws. You found a single metric, regional temperature variance, where models show divergence. You may have a few trivial points of agreement with "the scientific community", but the consensus disagrees with your generic climate-science denial! Why are you even here, but to obstruct collective intervention in carbon capital profits?
Thank you!