Scientists recently completed a compelling experiment. They knew Hurricane Florence was barreling towards the United States’ East Coast. It was whipping up ferocious winds and the potential to drop enough rain to flood huge swaths of land. A warming climate can provoke more severe weather events. So this team decided to probe whether Earth’s climate fever might have intensified Florence. And their study’s finding: It did!

This showed that Florence would end up being bigger than it would have been if it occurred in a world with no human-caused warming. A warmer sea surface and more available moisture in the air — both due to climate change — also point to Florence dumping 50 percent more rain on parts of the states of North and South Carolina.

The researchers described how they reached these assessments in a September 12 report posted on Stony Brook University’s website.

Such studies fall into a relatively new field known as attribution science. These studies investigate whether the intensity of some weather event — such as a hurricane, heat wave or flood — can be linked to certain particular conditions. Attribution science has been gaining increasing interest and respect. That became especially true after three studies last year found that a trio of extreme events in 2016 simply could not have happened without climate change.

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