> If you can’t say global warming is bogus because it’s particularly cold out today, you also can’t blame global warming on it being hot or rainy. And yet, we

> If you can’t say global warming is bogus because it’s particularly cold out today, you also can’t blame global warming on it being hot or rainy. And yet, we care a lot about the impacts of climate change, of which a particularly important and clearly visible category are the extreme weather events. We're not talking about it being hot or rainy, but a third of a county being flooded (Pakistan) or the worst heatwave ever recorded anywhere (China). And we're not just talking about one of these, but a lot of them. Statistics is not just about averages. In fact those are often not the most interesting numbers to crunch. The chance of extreme events occuring is what matters, and when they occur we can calculate what the odds are now versus what the odss were before global warming: in this way we can 'attribute' to degree to which climate change has contributed to the chance of such events happening. I don't remember which one, but there was an event which was 100% the result of climate change, which means there was zero chance of it happening before global warming.