Imagine rolling dice where sixes used to appear once every six throws. Now imagine someone secretly added weight to those dice, making sixes appear twice as often. Each individual roll still looks random, but over time, the pattern reveals something has fundamentally changed.

This is precisely what climate change does to our weather. The atmosphere hasn't abandoned its natural variability—storms, heatwaves, and floods have always occurred. But we've loaded the dice. Understanding this shift from random chance to weighted probability explains why unprecedented weather events keep breaking records that seemed unbreakable just years ago.

Here's something counterintuitive: a tiny shift in average temperature creates a dramatic shift in extreme temperatures. Think of a bell curve showing all possible temperatures in your city. Most days cluster around the middle—the average. Extremely hot and cold days sit at the far edges, in the tails of the curve.

When global warming pushes that entire curve slightly warmer—even by just 1°C—something remarkable happens at the edges. What was once a rare tail event suddenly falls within a much larger slice of the curve. A heatwave that used to occur once per century might now occur once per decade. The average barely budged, but the extremes multiplied.

Scientists call this the nonlinear relationship between means and extremes. In practical terms, it means we shouldn't wait for average temperatures to feel dramatically different. The signal shows up first in record-breaking events—the floods, droughts, and heat emergencies that overwhelm systems designed for yesterday's climate.

Takeaway

When someone dismisses climate change because average temperatures have only risen slightly, remember that extremes don't shift proportionally—they multiply. A 1-degree average increase can mean five times more dangerous heatwaves.

After a devastating flood or deadly heatwave, someone inevitably asks: was this caused by climate change? For decades, scientists could only speak in generalities. Now, a field called attribution science provides specific answers within days of an event.

The method works like a courtroom reconstruction. Scientists run thousands of climate simulations—some modeling our actual warming world, others modeling a hypothetical world where humans never burned fossil fuels. By comparing how often extreme events occur in each scenario, they calculate how much human activity changed the odds. The 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave, for example, was found to be virtually impossible without climate change—150 times more likely because of human influence.

This isn't guesswork. Attribution studies now undergo rapid peer review and publication, transforming how we understand disasters. Insurance companies use them to reassess risk. Legal cases cite them to establish responsibility. What once seemed like an unanswerable question—did we cause this?—now has scientific answers with quantified uncertainty.

Takeaway

Attribution science has transformed 'did climate change cause this?' from an unanswerable philosophical question into a calculable probability. We can now assign numbers to human responsibility for specific disasters.

Individual extremes are dangerous. But the truly catastrophic disasters happen when multiple extremes strike together—and climate change is making these compound events increasingly common. A drought alone stresses crops. A heatwave alone strains power grids. Both together? Simultaneous crop failure and grid collapse, exactly when people need air conditioning and food supplies most.

The physics connects these events. Warmer temperatures increase evaporation, drying soils faster during droughts while loading more moisture into the atmosphere for eventual flooding. The same atmospheric pattern that parks a heatwave over one region can stall storms over another. Climate change doesn't just intensify individual events—it creates conditions where multiple threats synchronize.

This interconnection breaks our traditional risk planning. Infrastructure, emergency services, and supply chains were designed assuming extreme events would be rare and separate. When a wildfire season, drought, and heatwave overlap—as increasingly happens in western North America—response systems face cascading failures. Understanding compound risk means recognizing that tomorrow's disasters will look less like amplified versions of yesterday's and more like unprecedented combinations.

Takeaway

The most dangerous climate impacts aren't single extreme events but combinations that overwhelm systems designed for one disaster at a time. Prepare for overlapping crises, not isolated emergencies.

Climate change hasn't replaced natural weather variability—it has tilted the playing field. The dice still roll randomly, but they're weighted toward outcomes that strain our infrastructure, threaten lives, and break records our grandparents thought would stand forever.

Understanding these loaded dice matters because it shapes how we prepare and adapt. We can't prevent all extreme weather, but we can stop adding weight to the dice—and build communities resilient enough to handle the odds we've already created.