The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season has been extremely active, and deadly. Between Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, plus Jose, thousands of structures have been destroyed and many people have been killed, injured, or displaced. Hurricane Harvey's deadly cocktail of wind and moisture hit America's fourth-largest city with a ferocity that Texas has never seen.

And while scientists maintain that no single weather event can be attributed to climate change, two centuries of human fossil-fuel burning has altered temperatures just enough to almost certainly make this particular storm worse.

"In general, the way to think about it is: climate change has changed the environment that everything is happening in," says Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for