A truck is seen stuck on a flooded road after the passing of Hurricane Laura in Grand Lake, south of Lake Charles, Louisiana, on Aug. 28, 2020.  (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

At a Glance

• Climate records have fallen one by one this year.
• Scientists say we can't blame the freakish weather on 2020.
• And things are only going to get worse.

One by one, climate and disaster records and milestones have been shattered in 2020. The stories of the extremes make daily headlines:

Nine cities see their earliest snowfall ever.

A South Dakota River was in flood stage for 17 months.

The last decade was the hottest ever recorded on Earth.

A brutal California heat wave had off-the-charts temperatures.

Historic wildfires burn across the western United States.

10 rapidly intensifying storms till November.

Things can only go up from here, right?

That's not what the experts say. Scientists and climate experts resoundingly agree that we're likely to see more years like 2020, with more intense, destructive and deadly weather events.

"These are all things we should expect to see more and more of as climate change takes a deeper hold on our climate and on the extremities that it creates in our weather," Jeff Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, told weather.com in a recent interview.

These extremes are being driven by temperature increases brought on by global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. Things like heat, drought and fire are especially influenced by climate change.

"As temperatures increase, warm-season phenomena like drought, wildfires and heatwaves are expected to be worsened both in intensity and in longevity," said weather.com meteorologist Jonathan Belles. "The increase in temperatures will dry out the ground and its flora, which will slowly lead to a positive feedback cycle of warmer temperatures, then less rainfall, then warmer temperatures and so forth."

Many of the phenomena happening now have been predicted for years by agencies like NASA, NOAA and the United Nations, as well as researchers and scientists around the world, who say the only chance of slowing climate change is cutting back or eliminating the biggest producers of greenhouse gases, including cars.

Damaged homes and cars are seen in a mobile home park destroyed by fire on Sept. 10, 2020, in Phoenix, Oregon. Hundreds of homes in the town have been lost due to wildfire. (David Ryder/Getty Images)

"It seems like this is what we always were talking about a decade ago," North Carolina State climatologist Kathie Dello told the Associated Press.

"A lot of people want to blame it on 2020, but 2020 didn’t do this. We know the behaviour that caused climate change."

Global temperatures have warmed an average of 2 degrees over the past century, according to NOAA. From 1900 to 1980, a new temperature record was typically set every 13.5 years. Since 1981, a new record's been set every three years.

"We know climate change is occurring based on palaeoclimatology records over thousands of years," Belles said. "We are just beginning to understand what the effects of climate change are, but science is beginning to present higher and higher doubts on certain things happening without climate change."

Rising sea levels driven by warmer ocean temperatures that cause water to expand, as well as increased melting of glaciers and ice sheets, are projected to make disasters like flooding and hurricanes worse.

Warmer water fuels hurricanes and recent research has linked climate change to storms that are more intense.

"The hurricanes question is still in a hot debate in the research community," Belles said. "The current thought process is that warmer temperatures will lead to warmer oceans and more fuel for hurricanes, but there may also be drier air and more wind shear. The end result may be fewer or a similar amount of storms, but more intense storms when they are able to thrive."

There are also indications that climate change is making hurricanes more likely to slow down.

"The reason for this is that hurricanes are made to move heat from the tropics to the poles in a constant effort to make the globe universally the same temperature, a dangerous balancing act," Belles said. "But the poles are warming considerably faster than the tropics, meaning there is less of a difference in temperature between the poles and the tropics and less of a reason for hurricanes to move northward away from the tropics."

He said that could lead to more flooding episodes like Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which stalled out and dumped huge amounts of rain over parts of Texas for days.

"It’s going to get a lot worse," Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb told the AP. "I say that with emphasis because it does challenge the imagination. And that’s the scary thing to know as a climate scientist in 2020."