What causes the increasing frequency of extreme weather events?

The Earth is getting warmer, and that makes extreme weather happen more often.

Imagine your favorite ice cream, when it’s cold outside, it stays nice and solid. But if the day gets really hot, your ice cream starts to melt faster, right? That’s kind of like what’s happening with our planet. The sun is giving Earth a little extra heat, just like a bigger fire under your ice cream cone.

Think about taking a bath, if the water is warm, it feels nice. But if you turn the hot tap all the way up, the water becomes very warm or even boiling. That’s what’s happening to Earth: we're turning the heat up too much.

This extra heat makes storms, droughts, and floods stronger and more common, just like how your ice cream melts faster when it's hotter. So, every time there’s a big storm or a long dry spell, you can think of it as the Earth saying, “Whoa, that was hot!”