Your Guide to Making the Climate Connection

The document argues that reporting on extreme weather is incomplete without explaining the climate connection. It provides specific phrasing for journalists to describe how warming temperatures 'supercharge' weather patterns and offers examples of this application across various phenomena, including heatwaves, droughts, flooding, sea level rise, winter weather, hurricanes, and wildfires. It also recommends specific attribution tools like the Climate Shift Index and World Weather Attribution to provide scientific grounding for these claims.

• Attribution science allows scientists to quantify the specific influence of climate change on individual weather events, such as the 2022 heatwave in India, which was made 100 times more likely due to climate change.
• Climate change influences various weather patterns by increasing the intensity and frequency of heatwaves, altering the water cycle to increase drought risk, and enabling the atmosphere to hold more water vapor, which leads to heavier rainfall.
• Warming oceans and rising sea levels contribute to more active hurricane seasons by providing more water vapor as fuel and increasing the risk of coastal and inland flooding through storm surges and slower-moving storms.
• Human-caused climate change exacerbates the hot and dry conditions that allow wildfires to ignite and spread, often in combination with poor land management and sprawling development.

APA

CCNow (2023). Your Guide to Making the Climate Connection. Covering Climate Now. https://coveringclimatenow.org/resource/your-guide-to-making-the-climate-connection/

Chicago

CCNow. Your Guide to Making the Climate Connection. Covering Climate Now, 2023. https://coveringclimatenow.org/resource/your-guide-to-making-the-climate-connection/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=CCNow |title=Your Guide to Making the Climate Connection |publisher=Covering Climate Now |date=12 October 2023 |url=https://coveringclimatenow.org/resource/your-guide-to-making-the-climate-connection/ |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{ccnow2023your, author = {CCNow}, title = {{Your Guide to Making the Climate Connection}}, institution = {Covering Climate Now}, year = {2023}, month = oct, url = {https://coveringclimatenow.org/resource/your-guide-to-making-the-climate-connection/}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }