There are few instances where climate scientists attribute specific events to climate change - the only time anyone prominent did it, Al Gore when he implied Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming - made scientists cringe a little, though they scrambled to rationalize it for him.
They haven't done it because science doesn't work that way. It's fine for sociologists to portray odd correlation-causation claims as fact, like that good grades make students healthier, but physical sciences prefer to stick to the data and away from circumstantial evidence.
So the Petermann glacier 'ice island' that broke off wasn't attributed to global warming though it was obviously a contributing factor in the minds of researchers - there simply was not proof that global warming caused it. Likewise with more rainfall or less rainfall, warmer of colder temperatures, etc. Specific events can't be attributed in a complex climate system, though clearly trends can.
That lack of willingness to adapt the certitude of economists is starting to change, though, and Newsweek is happy some climate scientists are learning to frame global warming by playing the blame game. They don't call it the blame game, of course, it is instead “fractional risk attribution”, which is a mathematical method to determine how many times an extreme event should have occurred if pesky humans never existed versus the probability of the same extreme event now.
See Newsweek writer Sharon Begley positively gush over the fact that some scientists aren't hiding behind the reputation damage done by too much framing of data recently and have taken to doing even more of it here.
Climate science learns the blame game - Newsweek ecstatic
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