With huge swaths of the mountain West in flames, chunks of the eastern seaboard suffering power outages after a massive storm, and nearly three-quarters of the lower 48 experiencing dry or drought conditions, extreme weather has been on everyone’s mind — with climate change not far behind.

Concerned scientists certainly saw an opportunity to get a message across: In a telephone briefing last week, Princeton geosciences professor Michael Oppenheimer said, “What we’re seeing is a window into what global warming really looks like. It looks like heat, it looks like fires, it looks like this kind of environmental disaster … This provides vivid images of what we can expect to see more of in the future.”