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Gene Blevins / Reuters






But there's much less certainty on whether carbon emissions are supercharging hurricanes, tropical cyclones or tornadoes. That's due in part to limitations in past data. Today, every tropical depression gets named and tracked, so there's no chance that a hurricane could somehow form without being noticed. And both professional and amateur storm trackers keep a close eye on tornadoes, so even in a cyclone that touches down for a few moments goes into the record books. But in the past, hurricanes were often just sketchily documented and only the strongest tornadoes — or the ones that actually caused damage — likely would have been recorded. The occurrence of strong and violent tornadoes may well have remained relatively stable over the long term; the fact that we're seeing more tornadoes overall now might simply mean that we're noticing storms we might have missed 30 or 40 years ago.

There's no doubt that the actual cost of extreme weather is on the rise, with U.S. insured losses from weather disaster soaring from $3 billion a year in the 1980s to about $20 billion a year in the past decade, adjusted for inflation. But it doesn't automatically follow that those higher costs are due to climate-change-powered superstorms. The U.S. and the world at large are both richer and more populated than they were 30 years ago, and much of that wealth is now concentrated along highly vulnerable areas like coastlines. When a hurricane like Irene rakes the East Coast as it did last summer, it can affect far more people and valuable property than it would in the past. That translates to greater potential losses.

The fact that it's impossible to draw a straight line between climate change and the seemingly more turbulent weather doesn't mean we should act as if the two aren't linked. There's no doubt that warming raises at least the risk of extreme-weather events, something we're thinking about more in the early part of what is shaping up to be a brutally hot year in the U.S. But the fastest way to reduce the death and damage from extreme weather is through adaptation, whether that takes the form of better tornado warnings or micro-insurance policies that allows subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa to bounce back from drought.

There's a reason that 95% of the deaths from natural disasters occur in the developing world; poverty leaves populations unprepared for extreme weather. That's true even within rich nations; it wasn't a coincidence that the handful of deaths caused by tornadoes in the Midwest occurred in a trailer park. But even poor countries or regions can learn to protect themselves. In 1970 a Category-3 cyclone killed an astounding 300,000 people in Bangladesh, yet an even stronger storm struck the country in 2007 and claimed only 4,200 lives — still a heartbreaking loss, but a far smaller one. Climate change and poverty can make extreme weather worse, but it doesn't have to claim lives.