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... Entitled "Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and their Impacts," the 254-page paper updates a 2016 assessment by the same institutions, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM).

"Significant progress has been made over the last decade, with major advancements in methods and modeling that allow for more robust assessments of extreme events," said James Hurrell, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University and chair of the committee that wrote the report.

Operating under a charter signed in 1863 by president Abraham Lincoln, the prestigious Academies are independent nonprofit institutions tasked with advising the government on scientific policy.

But these are no ordinary times under the administration of President Donald Trump, who has attacked the very idea that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet.

-- Getting specific --

Scientists have no such doubts. They have known for decades that climate change is altering the frequency and intensity of several types of extreme weather events, including hurricanes, heat waves and extreme rainfall.

But the field of attribution science allows them to move beyond detecting broad trends to investigating individual events -- what the authors call extreme event attribution (EEA) -- which can provide vital information to policymakers.

EEA studies compare an event's characteristics, such as its probability and intensity in the current climate, to a "counterfactual" world without human-caused emissions. ...