[encryptluks2]

That is like saying after a major earthquake... oh, fracking caused it. There is absolutely no way to say that climate change is responsible for this or the heat "dome" or whatever they called it here in the PNW. If you look at the averages, you can see that there are annual fluctuations. There are many factors to consider, not just that global warming is responsible for everything.

[_Microft]

You cannot say what is responsible (if that’s possible at all) but you can say whether climate changes makes events more (or less) probable than they used to be. Such statements are usually based on simulations (ensembles) where the number of occurrences of particular events is counted. An example that‘s easy to understand is probability of precipitation from the weather forecast: if it says that the probability of rain is 72% at a particular place, then it means that rain was observed in 72% of the simulations (which are run with slightly different parameters to account for uncertainty in starting conditions). This is a simplified description but maybe it helps?

[throwawaysea]

Agree. This is the third or fourth front page HN discussion about the recent couple days of heat in the Pacific Northwest, and all the discussions have been full of hot takes about climate change that unscientifically try to establish a cause without any statistical analysis or evidence.

Cliff Mass, Professor of Atmospheric Science and chief scientist of the Northwest Modeling Consortium mentioned in his recent blog posts that the heat wave was a perfect storm of factors like compression from sinking air coming off the West slopes of the Cascades. He also specifically noted (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatur...):

> Is global warming contributing to this heatwave? The answer is certainly yes. Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming. The answer is yes as well.