Climate scientists are pretty good at figuring out the causes of long-term trends. We know that dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will make global temperatures rise over time. But pinning down the cause of any single weather event—a specific heat wave, hurricane, or drought—is much more challenging, since extreme things could still happen without global warming. That's why scientists are so reluctant to say that any particular event happened "because of" climate change.

Nevertheless, there is a rapidly growing field of research that is attempting to improve this kind of one-off attribution. On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a dossier of 29 such studies, combing through some of 2014's worst weather events across the globe to search for the fingerprints of man-made climate change.

The scientists, who represent a range of prominent research institutions, looked at California's wildfire season; heat waves in Australia; drought in East Africa; flooding in Indonesia; hurricanes in Hawaii; and more. Their findings were as diverse as the events they examined, and they still tend to be framed as "Event X was made more likely because of climate change," rather than the simpler but less accurate "Event X was caused by climate change." Some events, such as Hawaii's hurricanes, appear to have a strong relationship to man-made global warming. Others, such as extreme rainfall in the United Kingdom last winter, showed no link at all.

Generally speaking, temperature-related events were more closely aligned with climate change than precipitation-related events. Here are a few more examples:

WILDFIRE IN CALIFORNIA

Over the last few years, as California has sunk deeper into an unprecedented drought, the wildfire season has essentially never ended. 2014 was bad; 2015 is worse; and the only good news is that this year's strong El Niño could mean a wet winter and thus a less-bad fire season in 2016. The link between climate change and fire is pretty straightforward: Snowpack melts earlier, summers are hotter and drier, and boom, more fires. And sure enough, that appears to be what is happening in California.