The question, according to Martha Shulski, Nebraska's state climatologist, isn't whether climate change caused the wild weather on Wednesday.
Rather, Shulski said the question is: "How much worse was it made by climate change?"
Record-high temperatures, dangerous winds and a border-to-border severe weather outbreak -- in mid-December -- are further evidence that climate change is not only real but happening now, the director of the state climate office said.
"The science is clear that climate change results in a more energetic atmosphere," Shulski said.
Warmer temperatures lead to more moisture in the atmosphere. More moisture in the atmosphere has shown to intensify storm events. The effects of those storm events is how we feel climate change, Shulski explained.
"To me, everything has some sort of climate change signature to it, it is just a matter of how much," she said.
Wednesday's fast-moving storm would have likely driven a blizzard had it taken place in mid-winter.
Instead, Nebraska is at the tail end of the third warmest autumn and seventh warmest November on record -- a trend Shulski says climatologists have tracked over the past 30 years -- as well as a warmer-than-normal December without any snow cover.
The result is record-high temperatures and ripe conditions for an outbreak of thunderstorms, with warm, southerly winds being whipped by lines of equal atmospheric pressure packed tightly together.
Shulski said the extreme weather event Wednesday is also evident if you zoom out to look at conditions across the northern hemisphere.
Temperatures in Fairbanks, Alaska, fell to minus-38 on Wednesday, as the high latitudes fell into what Shulski described as a "cold pool."
"When Alaska is very cold this time of year, that typically means we are anomalously warm," she said. "During transition times such as going from fall to winter, that strong temperature difference between high latitudes and us in the mid-latitudes often results in us having an active weather pattern."
While fall has been warmer than usual, continuing a decades-long trend, Decembers have been growing increasingly colder on average.
Januarys, meanwhile, have gotten increasingly warmer, and Februarys have cooled "quite significantly," Shulski said.
The warming across the globe has made more ridges and troughs in the jet stream, which allows arctic air to sink into the middle latitudes in some months, while allowing warmer air from near the equator to creep in during others.
"This see-saw pattern in our recent climate trends is how Nebraska is feeling climate change," she said.