Climate Fueled Extreme Weather
Part 1: A new series at THB
Roger Pielke Jr.
Jul 02, 2024
It is now a ubiquitous cultural ritual to blame any and every weather event on climate change. Those hot days? Climate change. That hurricane? Climate change. The flood somewhere that I saw on social media? Climate change.
With today’s post, the first in a series, I go beyond the cartoonish media caricatures of climate change, which I expect are here to stay, and explore the actual science of extreme events — how they may or may not be changing, and how we think we know what we know, and what we simply cannot know.
Quite apart from the outsized and oversimplified role of climate-fueled extreme weather in culture and politics, climate is fascinating and important — and worth understanding as more than a meme. This post lays the groundwork for this new THB series, starting with some important definitions and a quantitative thought experiment.
Let’s start with the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) definition of climate (bold emphasis added):
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/climate-fueled-extreme-weather
