With the latest death toll from floods in Thailand reaching nearly 400 people, reporters have had yet another opportunity to explore the connection between climate change and extreme weather events.

On Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by Michael Lemonick, a senior writer for Climate Central, a nonprofit journalism and science organization based in Princeton, New Jersey. The bottom line, spelled out in the headline, was that, “Climate change doesn’t ‘cause’ massive storms or severe droughts, but it raised the odds.” In order to make that point, Lemonick introduced an analogy worthy of journalists’ consideration.

He compared Thailand to a heart attack victim who, before croaking, smoked, had diabetes and high blood pressure, ate a diet high in salt and saturated fat, didn’t get any exercise, and had a history of heart attacks in the family:

So what killed him? Most people are savvy enough about health risks to know this is a trick question. You can’t pick out a single cause. His choices and his genes all contributed to the heart attack — but you can say with confidence that the more risk factors that pile up, the more likely it is to end badly.

Somehow, though, people think that it makes sense to ask whether a given extreme weather event — a devastating heat wave or a punishing drought or a deadly torrential rainstorm — is caused by climate change.

That’s a trick question too. Scientists know that the increasing load of greenhouse gases we’re pumping into the atmosphere doesn’t “cause” extreme weather. But it does raise the odds, just as a diet of triple bacon cheeseburgers raises the odds of heart disease.

This is the same idea behind as the famous “loading-the-dice” analogy, and readers may find the heart attack frame more intuitive. Nonetheless, both analogies miss an important point: not only is there mounting evidence that climate change has increased the likelihood of extreme weather events, but there is also mounting evidence that it has increased the likelihood that those events will be more intense.

The New York Times’s Andrew Revkin addressed this point in a 2010 blog post titled “Climate Extremes: Beyond Loaded Dice.” He quoted Steven Sherwood, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, explaining that:

The “loading the dice” analogy is becoming popular but it misses something very important: climate change also allows unprecedented (in human history) things to happen. It is more like painting an extra spot on each face of one of the dice, so that it goes from 2 to 7 instead of 1 to 6. This increases the odds of rolling 11 or 12, but also makes it possible to roll 13.

Evidence that climate change increases not only the likelihood of extreme weather events, but also the likelihood that they’ll be real record-setters, has piled up in the last two weeks. But it’s important for reporters to remember that the strength of the connection between climate change and extreme weather depends on the specific type of weather event.

On October 24, PNAS published a paper by scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. It described a new method for quantifying the link between long-term warming trends and heat records—for instance, concluding that there is an 80 percent chance that 2010 Russian heat wave would not have occurred without climate change. (The paper didn’t get much coverage beyond a well-done post by Wired’s Brandon Keim).

On Tuesday, The Associated Press and AFP shared details from a leaked draft summary of an upcoming special report on managing the risks of extreme weather. The report, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says it is likely that climate change has already increased the frequency and/or intensity of heat waves, droughts, and floods.

TAGS: , , ,

Curtis Brainard is the editor of The Observatory, CJR's online critique of science and environment reporting. Follow him on Twitter @cbrainard.