Dr. Michael Mann:

Yes, so we're not saying that climate change is literally causing the events to occur.

What we can conclude with a great deal of confidence now is that climate change is making these events more extreme. And it's not rocket science. You warm up the atmosphere, it is going to hold more moisture, you get larger flooding events, you get more rainfall.

You warm the planet, you're going to get more frequent and intense heat waves. You warm the soils, you dry them out, you get worst drought. You bring all that together, and those are all the ingredients for unprecedented wildfires.

Now, beyond that, there's something else that we think is happening. And that's why there is this coherence, that all of these events around the Northern Hemisphere, extreme floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, what connects them is the fact that these weather systems are remaining in place, they're remaining stationary.

We have these large undulations in the jet stream. And that gives us extreme weather. But what's also happening is that the jet stream isn't moving them along. We have a slow jet stream.

And so these weather systems stay in the same place day after day. They rain on the same locations day after day. That's when you get unprecedented flooding. They bake the ground day after day. That's when you get unprecedented heat and drought.

And we think that climate change is actually creating those conditions. Climate change is literally making the jet stream more wild. It undulates more, so you get those weather extremes, and it's causing the jet stream to slow down, so those extreme weather events stick around.

And that's when you get unprecedented damage and threat.