Climate change didn't cause Hurricane Ida, an "explosively intensifying tropical storm" bearing down on Louisiana on the anniversary of Katrina. But it's virtually certain it made it worse.
https://twitter.com/KHayhoe/status/1167851841041981440
It will take some time for the formal attribution studies to be done, and published. @FrediOtto and I explain the emerging field of rapid attribution of extreme events (how much more likely, intense, or stronger climate change made a given event), here: nytimes.com/2021/08/17/opi…
But given that science has already showed that a warmer ocean and other aspects of climate change are leading to much faster intensification of hurricanes and is also making them bigger, slower and with a lot more rainfall... (source: science2017.globalchange.gov)
...the question today is not, to paraphrase climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, how could climate change affect this event--but rather how could it NOT, as it is occurring over the massively altered background conditions of our 1.1C warmer planet.
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