Even for a world getting used to wild weather, May seems stuck on strange. Torrential downpours in Texas that have whiplashed the region from drought to flooding. A heatwave that has killed more than 2,000 people in India. Record 32 degree Celsius readings in Alaska, of all places. A pair of typhoons in the Northwest Pacific. And a drought taking hold in the east of the US. "Mother Nature keeps throwing us crazy stuff," Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis said. "It's just been one thing after another." Jerry Meehl, an extreme-weather expert at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, pointed out that May is usually a pretty extreme month. Even so, he said, this has been "kind of unusually intense." The word "stuck" provides one possible explanation. Francis, Meehl and other meteorologists say the jet stream is in a rut, not moving nasty weather along. The high-speed, constantly shifting river of air 9,100 metres above earth normally guides storms around the globe, but sometimes splits and comes back together somewhere else. A stuck jet stream, with a bit of a split, explains the extremes in Texas, India, Alaska and the US east, but not the typhoons, Francis said. Other possible factors contributing to May's wild weather: the periodic warming of the central Pacific known as El Nino, climate change and natural variability, scientists say. For every degree Celsius the air is warmer, it can hold seven per cent more moisture. That, Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon says, "is supplying more juice to the event". While it is too early to connect one single event to man-made warming, scientific literature shows "that when it rains hard, it rains harder than it did 20 to 30 years ago," said University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd. As bad as the Texas flooding has been, the heatwave in India has been far worse - in fact, the world's fifth-deadliest since 1900, with reports of the 38 degree-plus heat even buckling roads. And it's a consequence of the stuck jet stream, according to Francis and Weather Underground meteorology director Jeff Masters. When climate scientists look at what causes extreme events, heatwaves are the ones most definitely connected to global warming, Shepherd said. El Nino is known to change the weather worldwide, often making things more extreme. This El Nino is itself weird. It was long predicted but came far later and weaker than expected. So experts dialled back forecasts. Then El Nino got stronger quickly. Some scientists say the jet stream has been changing in recent years because of shrinking Arctic sea ice, an idea that has not been totally accepted but is gaining ground, Shepherd says. Katharine Hayhoe, a scientist at Texas Tech University, likens what is happening to a stewpot: Natural climate fluctuations such as El Nino go into it. So do jet stream meanderings, random chance, May being a transition month, and local variability. Then throw in the direct and indirect effects of climate change. "We know that the stew has an extra ingredient," Hayhoe said, referring to climate change. "That ingredient is very strong. Sometimes you add one teaspoon of the wrong ingredient and boy, it can take your head off."