New England has had a rough few winters. A succession of powerful nor’easters have buried cities, knocked out power for hundreds of thousands of people, and prompted inevitable questions about whether something has changed with the weather.
But on the specific question of whether the most intense nor’easters are getting more intense over the long term, the world’s leading assessor of climate science—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—has a clear and perhaps surprising answer: We don’t know. That answer deserves more attention than it gets.
I have long argued that if the IPCC did not exist, we would have to invent it. Here is why.
Each year, climate science sees hundreds of thousands of studies, published by researchers using different data and different methods, and often reaching different, even contradictory, conclusions. Any individual paper—even a very good one—represents just a single attempt to answer a narrow question with the tools available at a particular moment.
Science advances by testing many claims against each other, gradually sorting those that stand the test of time from those that do not. Sometimes, even long-standing, accepted claims are overturned.