A Hail of a Night in Mexico

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https://eos.org/articles/a-hail-of-a-night-in-mexico

By Humberto Basilio, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: When a severe hailstorm hit Mexico’s capital last week, citizens began to wonder whether climate change could be the cause. But is that the right question to ask? ...Approximately 20 metric tons of hail collapsed the 1,000-square-meter roof of the local supermarket. ...more than a dozen other incidents were reported that night in the Álvaro Obregón, Benito Juárez, Iztapalapa, and Coyoacán municipalities. ...Although hail is frequent in Mexico City during the spring-summer transition, citizens were surprised by the sheer volume covering the highways and houses on 12 June. ...Still, for Jorge García, a climate physicist at Columbia University, the problem is that the question being asked (“Is this severe weather caused by climate change?”) is wrongly formulated from the start. Extreme weather events have always existed; none of them are specifically, solely “caused” by climate change. But climate change has affected the atmosphere in which all these events happen, and that influences the severity of the events. ...So instead of asking whether anthropogenic climate change caused the hailstorm, García said that “what we can ask ourselves is how climate change affected the amount of hail and the probability of having this storm that turned the whole city white. Would this storm have been the same 100 years ago? Most likely not.”.… 

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