If it seems like the weather is getting worse and there are more storms, droughts and heatwaves these days, you wouldn’t be wrong. And at least one major insurance company says climate change is the driving force behind it all.USA Today reports that Munich Re — the world’s largest reinsurer — says climate change is causing the rise in hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, heatwaves and drought and that we should expect that trend to continue — particularly in North America.The number of natural disasters per year has been rising dramatically on all continents since 1980, but the trend is steepest for North America.“North America is the continent with the largest increases in disasters,” USA Today reports Munich Re’s Peter Hoppe as saying.The company’s report focused on the past 30 years of climate history in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.Mr Hoppe told the newspaper that this report represents the first finding of a climate change “footprint” in the data from natural catastrophes.USA Today also quoted a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado who takes issue with Munich Re’s findings. “Thirty years is not an appropriate length of time for a climate analysis, much less finding casual factors like climate change,” Professor Roger Pielke said.An atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, Clifford Mass, told the paper that once the reinsurer’s findings are adjusted for population there is no recent upward trend in tornado or hurricane damages and that he feels there’s no evidence that global warming is causing more extreme weather in the US.Mr Hoppe said however that even when the data were adjusted for population spread and increased population values, the company still saw significant increases in the costs of weather disasters over the past few years.