Certain kinds of weather disasters should be called “climate change.”
The new methods of scientific attribution of a single event is causing confusion.
A large disaster is chosen and modeled on a computer. The model will examine the probability of the event in a warming vs. a pre-industrial world. If the likely-hood of that event increases enough with climate change they will say global warming was a factor. The science of attributing individual events is driven by improvements in modelling local effects, which is interesting to scientists.
Every year the meteorological society publishes a list of papers on individual events, to see if a climate connection can be made. In the 2016 report a grim milestone was passed in that there were 3 events , all heat waves, that could not be modeled using a pre-industrial earth, and could thus be unequivocally attributed to climate change. This is vary alarming, but it did not mean that there has not been a clear connection between climate and disasters for a long time.
This same problem exists with smoking. Smoking causes lung cancer, but nobody can attribute any individual case to cigars or cigarettes, since other things cause lung cancer. That is the reality of statistics, but does anybody really care? These details don’t belong in politics. It is our job to be hysterics.
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters (2018). https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/
Another way of looking at attribution (guilt) is that every event takes place in a warming world, which increases their intensity. The title picture from NOAA illustrates this point. The histogram part is the number of events of a type with losses of more than 1 billion dollars. The lines are the cost in constant dollars of the years events. Disasters that one would expect to increase in a warming world have obviously increased in number. Total costs which are shown in the lines have increased by at least a factor of 4 since the 80s ( Using the 5 year trailing average line). The obvious reason is that global warming has made big disasters into huge ones, increasing the number of huge events.
To a first approximation there is a factor of 5 increase in flooding events and storms over 1 billion in damage from the 1980s to the 2010s. If you state that all of them are due to climate change, you would only be wrong one time out of 5, which is a high batting average for politics. Or alternatively 5/6 of the damage caused by large storms is caused by climate change. A similar look at flooding would allow you to say that 2/3 of the flooding damage is caused by global warming. The damage caused by billion dollar wildfire events in the continental United States has increased from a 5 five year average of zero to a 5 year average of 5 billion dollars a year from the 1980s to the 2010s. Drought has a lower trend but billion dollar droughts have occurred in 9 of the last 10 years as opposed to 5 of the 10 years in the 1980s. Winter storms also show a slight upward trend in damage but were much worse in the 1990s, which is about what you would expect. And agricultural freeze losses show a downward trend. Similar data on earthquakes show a slight upward trend in damage.
Worsening of disasters wre an early warning sign of global warming not a late sign. The built environment is very sensitive to changes in wind speed and water level once a damage threshold has been reached. Statistically moving a mean means that the frequency of extreme events at the tails increases much faster than one would expect from average changes.