No I stand by it, talking about cause when the effect is probabilistic is an endless quagmire that people should avoid. Trying to attribute an individual case of cancer to smoking is nigh impossible, which is part of the reason tobacco companies got away with it for so long.
Plenty of companies have gotten away with bad practices by simply demanding proof for each individual case, the earlier we recognize this as a meaningless question the better.
Smoking causes cancer is true. But not everyone who smokes will get cancer and some people who don’t smoke will get cancer. Causation is hard. But we also know that particular cancers are caused by particular acts of smoking. The causal generalization is built on the observation of particulars. It might be hard but I don’t see why we wouldn’t, a priori, be able to say ‘this event was made worse by climate change because it likely affected input x’.
I generally agree with you that this isn’t easy to do, the value isn’t clear, and whether we can say such things with the evidence we have for any particular event isn’t obvious.
Plenty of companies have gotten away with bad practices by simply demanding proof for each individual case, the earlier we recognize this as a meaningless question the better.