A Decade of Climate Science Confirmed What We Already Knew

Over the last decade, scientists learned a great deal about the climate, much of it concerning the connection between global warming and extreme events — heat waves, hurricanes, floods, droughts and wildfires.

There has been, for many years, an understanding that a warmer world would be a more temperamental one, and measurements upon measurements show the average temperature is rising in step with those predictions. But until recently it was hard to prove that our changed atmosphere was having an influence on extreme events, which, after all, have been drowning and parching and starving people long before anyone started burning fossil fuels.