首先:它是非常困难的,如果不是不可能的,一个异常天气事件归咎于气候变化。天气展示大量的自然变化。最近接二连三的寒冷的天气,最近北美东部的气候变化是一致的,甚至预测气候变化的结果。然而,这一连串寒冷的天气也完全符合自然天气的变化。如上所述,很难属性一个天气异常的气候变化。冬天的天气,就其性质而言,极其变量。同样重要的是要记住,这寒冷的天气是一个局部的事件。欧洲和亚洲今年冬天很温和的。不要感到惊讶,如果12月和1月是相当温暖的比当平均在进入地球历史值。即使它不是,不伪造气候变化。 Climate change is about what happens after removing short term variations ("years" is short term) from the equation. Note that I have been consistently using the term climate change rather than global warming. It's not that global warming is an incorrect term. People mistakenly take global warming to mean that every single day will be warmer than it was a year ago, everywhere on the planet. The science does not say this. As noted above, the recent spate of cold weather that has plagued and continues to plague eastern North America is completely consistent with and has been predicted by climate change (or global warming, if you will). But it's also consistent with natural variations. That said, at least one event during the last year most likely was amplified by climate change, and that would be the huge amount of water dumped on southeast Texas by Hurricane Harvey. Tropical cyclones (e.g. hurricanes) and even very strong ones, are natural occurrences. Climate change does not predict that we will get more tropical cyclones. It does however predict that they will get more severe as the Earth warms up, on average. The huge amounts of water dumped by Harvey are consistent with and predicted by climate change, but not so much consistent with natural variations. While Harvey itself wasn't caused by climate change, a sizable portion of the 52 inches of the rain that it dumped most likely was a result of climate change.