Sound Science Bite: October 11. Was Hurricane Michael a Result of Climate Change?

Of course it was. Now, you may hear climate scientists say that you need to carefully study any particular weather event to determine if it was related to climate change. In a way this is true, and in a way it is very misleading. It should be a no-brainer to realize that if the climate changes, the individual weather events won't be the same either. Without human influence on the climate, there would have been no Michael. There might have been a worse storm at a different time and place or no storm at all or ?. It's sort of like having a choice between a job in New York City and a job in St. Louis. Things will be a lot different for you based on that decision.

So, whatever the weather is today where you are, it would be different were there no human influence on the climate. (This does not mean there would be no climate change as climate can change naturally and has done so for as long as there has been a climate.) Maybe the difference would be minor, even hardly noticeable (assuming you could know what the weather would be like without climate change). After all, it still gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter, climate change or no.

Climate scientists have to deal in probabilities as the ocean-atmosphere system is highly chaotic (in the sense of the physics of chaos). This chaotic behavior is why your forecasts get less certain the farther into the future they are made. So, it is really difficult (and, ironically, very easy!) to nail any specific event to climate change. If a study of Michael is made, it will likely conclude (I'm guessing) that the unusually warm Gulf water made it probable that climate change contributed to Michael's strength. But one thing is certain. The weather where you are is not exactly the same today as it would have been without climate change.