Is deadly weather being ‘supercharged’?

So that’s it then: the Guardian has declared that we are all being scorched, drowned and blown over by climate change. The website Carbon Brief, it says, has found ‘stark evidence of how global heating is already supercharging deadly weather beyond anything ever experienced by humanity’. Never mind that humans were around to witness multiple ice ages – let’s have a look at Carbon Brief’s claim.

The report looks at 744 extreme weather events and trends measured by 617 different studies and makes the claim that in 74 per cent of cases, the event had been made more likely or more severe by anthropogenic climate change, while 9 per cent of events had been made less likely or less severe.

Problem number one is that these are not actually 744 different extreme weather events; many of them are multiple studies of the same event, some of which came to very different conclusions.