> Is it clear that climate change is responsible for the extent of the damage?

That's highly odd way to phrase the question.

Climate change is responsible for more energy in the oceans, which is responsible for more, bigger, storms. Bigger storms mean more damage per storm. Climate and weather are different. The climate changing in a manner that makes the weather more extreme will always contribute to damage, but will never be "responsible" for it as it will always be the weather causing the damage...

So: this is the third "once in 500 years" event in 3 years. That is what "climate change" looks like. These storms "suddenly" popping up? Climate change means more of that, as we have been seeing and can demonstrate statistically. The long term prognosis? Thanks to climate change it's worse, with these rare events becoming ever more frequent, and the extent of damages growing over time.

Our climate is provably changing, from human activity. This is very clear. Barring holodecks there are no primary causes for weather than climate... Change that climate away from what our society is adapted for and expect pain.

This story has also been in the NYT, as I recall:

> Tomball, Texas, Public Works director David Esquivel told a local paper there this year that the Houston area had “two 500-year storms back to back”: over Memorial Day weekend of 2015 and early April 2016. That means that Hurricane Harvey constitutes the third “500-year” flood in three years.

Rare meteorological events do not correlate to large scale disasters, per se. They only reflect the probability of the underlying event happening in any given year. Imagine that your nearest creek "flooding" by 2 inches should only happen every thousand years, for example.

> We've got catostrophic storms going back every decade. Donna, Hugo, Andrew, Katrina, Harvey...none of this is new.

Aaaaand here's the fundamental confusion with those kinds of summaries: what is the difference between speed and acceleration?

We have always had bad weather. Having more bad weather than before, more frequently, is the issue. Climate change did not invent the hurricane. Climate change ensures our hurricanes will be bigger, more frequent, and more likely to combine with other larger, more frequent, weather systems. See Sandy, for example.

The past decade has been pretty lull as far as hurricanes go in the Atlantic and Caribbean. We haven't seen closer to the activity that they saw in the 50s and 60s in my lifetime.

The "number of hurricanes" is irrelevant. Arguably it is misleading: many small hurricanes is much more human friendly than a few monster hurricanes. Climate predictions are solid on more intense hurricanes that last longer, have more rainfall in the short term, and additionally increase with (mild) frequency in the decades to come.

At the same time, hurricanes are a specific weather incident with no reflection on the broader climate (monsoons, tropical storms, cyclones, Pacific/atlantic differences, el ninos, etc etc).

At the same same time changing the goalposts of the conversation from number of "once in 500 years" to "how many hurricanes" is in-congruent. As I pointed out: rare events do not directly correlate to extreme events.

TBH: climate trolls and sceptics on the net really need to up their game. This stuff was played out in the 90s. Any information anyone is honestly missing on this topic is readily available in google, so at this point one has to assume that ignorance is willful.