New Findings: Explaining Extreme Events from a Climate Perspective

A special report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS)  was just published with assessments of how human-caused climate change may have affected the strength and likelihood of individual extreme events (it covers 2015 and 2016). 
WHAT A WARMING WORLD DOES: Global warming causes temperature extremes. Some places will see extreme cold outbreaks while others experience record heat, flooding, drought, etc. 
NO DOUBT - As a meteorologist, I will tell you there is NO DOUBT that man-made pollution has exacerbated climate change. NASA, NOAA and agencies around the world have seen it, recorded it, confirmed it. Watch the NASA animation that shows Arctic sea ice shrinking since 1979.

Caption: A NASA visualization of the annual minimum Arctic sea ice from 1979 to 2016 with a graph overlay.  Credit: NASA   Source: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4573

ABOUT THE STUDY
This sixth edition of BAMS explains extreme events of the previous year (2016) from a climate perspective. It is the first of these reports to find that some extreme events were not possible in a preindustrial climate. (In other words, man-made pollution has helped trigger them).   

SOME RECORD EVENTS
The events included the 2016 record global heat, the heat across Asia, as well as a marine heat wave off the coast of Alaska.

NOT UNEXPECTED IN A WARMING WORLD
While these results are novel, they were not unexpected. Climate attribution scientists have been predicting that eventually the influence of human-caused climate change would become sufficiently strong as to push events beyond the bounds of natural variability alone. It was also predicted that we would first observe this phenomenon for heat events where the climate change influence is most pronounced. Additional retrospective analysis will reveal if, in fact, these are the first events of their kind or were simply some of the first to be discovered.

SOME SPECIFIC EVENTS (from the report):

1) SEVERE FROSTS IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA - Human influence may have enhanced the circulation pattern that drives cold outbreaks and frost risk over southwest Western Australia in September 2016, but larger thermodynamic changes may have still made these events less likely. The wheat belt of southwest Western Australia (SWWA) experienced several severe frosts just before harvest in September 2016, leading to a loss

of one million tonnes of grain crops

2) THE RECORD HOT TEMPERATURES OF APRIL 2016 IN THAILAND would not have occurred without the influence of both anthropogenic (manmade pollution) forcings and El Niño, which also increased the likelihood of low rainfall.  April  heat  reached unprecedented levels. Drought that affected 41 Thai provinces, had

devastating effects on major crops, such as rice and sugar cane, and incurred a total loss in the agricultural production of about half a billion U.S. dollars

3) THE EXTREME 2015/16 EL NIÑO

Record warm central equatorial Pacific Ocean temperatures during the 2015/16 El Niño appear to partly reflect an anthropogenically forced (man-made pollution)  trend. Whether they reflect changes in El Niño variability remains uncertain.

Of course, these are just a few examples... there are many more. 
CHECK OUT NASA's CLIMATE WEBPAGE: https://climate.nasa.gov/