According to the NY Times[0], the direct cause is El Nino, but climate change may be indirectly responsible because it makes extreme weather events more extreme

According to the NY Times[0], the direct cause is El Nino, but climate change may be indirectly responsible because it makes extreme weather events more extreme. Furthermore, El Nino has been getting worse alongside climate change getting worse, so it's not entirely unreasonable to say "hey these two might be related" until new evidence and computer modeling is done. The IPCC model tells you that carbon forcing is going to give you a certain amount of global average temperature rise, but it isn't a detailed weather forecasting model that can say "Panama is going to become a desert on November 13th, 2023". If we want to know specific local effects we need to run other simulations based off the IPCC predictions. Many of these weren't done because it wasn't necessary. The IPCC model was already forecasting massive economic damage, that should be enough to scare politicians into doing something, right? :P To be perfectly clear: there will always be gaps where someone can point to and say, "well, over here, we're not sure climate change is responsible yet". We will never have enough scientists to study absolutely every possible effect of climate change, even retroactively. In fact, this is part of why the response to climate change was and is so underwhelming. Fossil fuel companies poured billions of dollars into junk science to try and promote literally any possible alternative explanation, which left enough doubt to make politicians hesitate on the potentially risky move of moving away from carbon-generating fossil fuels[1]. The thing the average reader should take away is: - We know global warming will be very, very bad for the majority of humanity, but... - We don't know exactly who and where it will hurt the worst, and attributing specific weather events to global warming is difficult[2], but... - Regardless of how fuzzy the evidence is, saying that any given weather event is "caused by climate change" is still a safe bet. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/economy/panama-canal-drought-shipping.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/economy/panama-c... [1] To those shouting the words "nuclear fission" right now, I hear you. The fossil fuel companies also somehow brainwashed the German Greens and Greenpeace with similar bullshit, to the point where Germany is shutting off nuclear plants to replace with the dirtiest burning coal imaginable. Lignite balls. [2] Like, Nobel Prize level research. Ok, so there isn't exactly a Nobel Prize for meteorology, but physics is close enough.