Climate Change to Blame for Weather

Scientists are talking about the weather—and not just because they’re bad at cocktail chatter. The evidence is mounting that individual weather events—including sudden floods, heat waves, and other oddities—have climate change at their root, experts say. “We’re seeing a great deal of progress in attributing a human fingerprint to the probability of particular events or series of events,” said Christopher Field, who is co-chair of a United Nations report due out in 2014. Until recently, scientists have shied from pinning any particular weather event on climate change, but that has changed as studies on extreme meteorological happenings have piled up.