In a strictly narrow causal sense, particular severe or extreme weather events cannot be related to global climate change. As Mike Hulme of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia said in The Guardian newspaper on 15 March, ‘it is not possible to prove or disprove that a given severe weather event only occurred because of a rapidly warming global climate’.
In its forthcoming third assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which brings together the world’s leading climate scientists, is likely to reassert that there is no clear scientifically proven causal relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and severe weather.
