This fifth edition of explaining extreme events of the previous year (2015) from a climate perspective continues to provide evidence that climate change is altering some extreme event risk.

Human activities, such as greenhouse gas emissions and land use, influenced specific extreme weather and climate events in 2014, including tropical cyclones in the central Pacific, heavy rainfall in Europe, drought in East Africa, and stifling heat waves in Australia, Asia, and South America, according to a new report released.

Socio-economic stress from the unequivocal warming of the global climate system could be mostly felt by societies through weather and climate extremes. The vulnerability of European citizens was made evident during the summer heatwave of 2003 when the heat-related death toll ran into tens of thousands. Human influence at least doubled the chances of the event according to the first formal event attribution study, which also made the ominous forecast that severe heatwaves could become commonplace by the 2040s.

A report investigates the causes of a wide variety of extreme weather and climate events from around the world in 2013. Published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, "Explaining Extreme Events of 2013 from a Climate Perspective" addresses the causes of 16 individual extreme events that occurred on four continents in 2013.

This new analysis published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society links human-caused climate change to half of 2012′s extreme weather.

When extreme weather strikes, somebody, somewhere always asks about a link to climate change. It's time we gave straight answers.

The climate community must work together to create a single, clean, comprehensive and open repository of detailed temperature data, say Peter A. Stott and Peter W. Thorne.