How Global Warming Fueled Five Extreme Weather Events<br />To judge whether global warming made a particular extreme weather event more likely to occur, scientists typically compare data from the real world,<br />where rising greenhouse gases have heated the planet over the past century, against a modeled counterfactual world without those rising emissions.<br />In some cases, scientists either ruled out or could not find a significant role for climate change, effectively arguing<br />that a given weather extreme could just as likely have occurred in a world without global warming.<br />Here are five extreme weather events from 2016 that scientists now think were made more likely by global<br />warming: Last year, Earth reached its highest temperature on record, beating marks set in 2015 and 2014.<br />Here, scientists were more measured in putting all the blame on global warming, in part because the impact of El Niño was tough to disentangle: A study led by Sophie C. Lewis of Australian National University concluded<br />that human greenhouse gas emissions "likely increased the risk of the extreme Great Barrier Reef event" by increasing thermal stress in the ocean.
