Climate Change for Quant-heads

Krugman has one of the best explanations of climate change phenomena that I've seen so far. Basically, to prove that any given, isolated event--say a record high on a summer day in August--was caused by climate change, we'd need to show that its probability fell in the area on his second graph to the right of the threshold, above the blue line, and below the red line. It's probably not all that intuitive if one doesn't know some basic statistics, though.