The past week’s images from Australia have been nightmarish: walls of flame, blood-red skies, residents huddled on beaches as they try to escape the inferno. The bush fires have been so intense that they have generated “fire tornadoes” powerful enough to flip over heavy trucks. And all of these catastrophes were related to climate change. Notice that I said “related to” rather than “caused by” climate change. Any individual weather event has multiple causes, which was one reason news reports used to avoid mentioning the possible role of climate change in natural disasters.

Source: New York Times January 02, 2020 23:37 UTC