Picture this: a city is underwater, a forest is on fire, or a heatwave has broken a century-old record. Within hours, the same question floods social media — "Did climate change cause this?" It sounds simple. The answer, it turns out, is anything but.

Rebecca Hersher, senior climate editor at NPR, has thought about this question more carefully than most people ever will. Every time extreme weather makes headlines, she sends a guidance note to her colleagues — a kind of cheat sheet for thinking clearly about climate and causation. Her core message is quietly radical: climate change does not create disasters from nothing, but it makes almost every weather extreme more likely, more intense, or longer-lasting. The science behind this idea, known as attribution science, has matured remarkably fast over the past decade.

Researchers can now calculate, within weeks of a major event, how much more probable it was made by rising global temperatures. A European heatwave, a flooding event in West Africa, a wildfire season in Australia — all of these can be examined through this lens. Why does the framing matter so much? Because words carry weight in a newsroom — and in a democracy.

If journalists say a hurricane was "just weather," the public may conclude that nothing systematic is happening.