QOTD: Gavin Schmidt on tornadoes

Climate scientists have been weighing in on the indeterminate culpability of anthropogenic carbon emissions on the tragic storms in the Southern United States. It is worth remembering that, while we can and should expect an increasing frequency of extreme weather events as climate change intensifies, we have yet to fully predict in advance or attribute in retrospect any direct 1:1 causality between emissions and discrete weather events. Climate scientist Gavin Schmidt puts it very well:

It is a truism to say that everything has been affected by climate change so far and therefore this latest outbreak must in some sense have been affected, but attribution is hard and the further down the chain the causality is supposed to go, the harder this is. For heat waves it is easier, for statistics on precipitation intensity it easier – there are multiple levels of good modelling, theory and observations to back it up. But we have much less to go on with tornadoes.