It’s Too Soon to Attribute the California Storms to Climate Change, Experts Say

The relentless storms that hit California from Dec. 27 to Jan. 16 caused extreme flooding and extensive damage in most of the state, killing at least 22 people. A series of storms hit back to back, soaking the state in the midst of California’s driest three-year period on record.

“If anybody doubts that climate is changing, then they must have been asleep for the last couple of years,” President Joe Biden said in California on Jan. 19, after witnessing the destruction left behind by the storms. 

He later added: “For example, places that were ravaged by past wildfires are now at a higher risk of landslides. Extreme weather caused by climate change means stronger and more frequent storms, more intense droughts, longer wildfire seasons — all of which threaten communities across California.” 

There is a good scientific basis to think that storms, including the type that struck California, are generally becoming more extreme due to climate change. But climate scientists told us it’s too soon to know whether climate change had a role in this particular event, and if so, to what degree.

“We are not entirely sure,” Julie Kalansky, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, told us in an interview. “It’s an active area of research.” 

, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told