The record-breaking 252mph winds of Hurricane Melissa that devastated Caribbean islands at the end of October were made five times more likely by the climate crisis. Scorching wildfire weather in Spain and Portugal during the summer was made 40 times more likely, while June’s heatwave in England was made 100 times more likely.

Attribution science has made one thing clear: global heating is behind today’s extreme weather. That greenhouse gas emissions warmed the planet was understood. What can now be shown is that this warming produces record heatwaves and more violent storms with increasing frequency.

What we can do to minimise, or at least reduce, the risks to life from such events – as well as more gradual changes – is what climate adaptation experts think about all the time. The alarming consensus is that we are not doing anywhere near enough. The result is paid for in lives: floods and cyclonic storms across Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia left hundreds dead at the end of November.

The president of Cop30 in Brazil, André Corrêa do Lago, called for the UN climate change conference to be a “Cop of adaptation”. But the governments of the most vulnerable countries went home from Belém angry about an outcome that saw the projected size of the annual adaptation budget triple to $120bn, but with the deadline pushed back to 2035 and no clear mechanism to make rich countries pay up.

Even that total falls short of the

© The Guardian