How Global Warming Makes Hurricanes, Floods and Droughts Worse

Scientists have predicted for decades that the burning of fossil fuels would push average temperatures ever higher and conjure dangerous extremes. A branch of science that’s emerged in the past 20 years, extreme event attribution, connects global warming to severe episodes of weather more definitively. Many heat waves, cyclones, floods, droughts and wildfires — including ones making headlines in 2023 — are now routinely tied to climate change.

Heat waves are the weather events most directly linked to humanity’s greenhouse gas pollution. And heat, along with dryness and wind, fuels forest fires, which is why scientists have become so confident that climate change is making wildfires in the western US, Australia and elsewhere much worse. (The US fire season is two months longer than it was in the 1970s and 1980s.) Global warming is making tropical cyclones, also called hurricanes or typhoons, more intense, though not necessarily more frequent. Warmer ocean waters and moister air — two results of global warming — provide added fuel to tropical cyclones and other storms.