After deadly flooding in central Texas in 1987, some thought they’d proven they could handle Mother Nature’s best punch.

Researchers agree that climate change has made torrential downpours more frequent—but the science gets murky when examining how strong the link is between an extreme event and climate change.

"These are roughly one-in-1,000-year events, [and] would be extremely rare in the absence of human-caused warming,” one climate scientist says.