Dan Vergano has been doing some good reporting at USA Today:
Hurricane Irene this year pushed the U.S. yearly record for billion-dollar natural disasters to 10, smashing the 2008 record of nine. In the “Current Extreme Weather and Climate Change” report, released today by the Climate Communication scientific group, leading climate scientists outlined how increasing global atmospheric temperatures and other climate change effects — triggered by industrial emissions of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide and methane — are loading the dice for the sort of extreme weather seen this year.
“Greenhouse gases are the steroids of weather,” says climate projection expert Jerry Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, at a briefing held by the report’s expert reviewers. “Small increases in temperature set the stage for record breaking extreme temperature events.” Overall, says the report, higher temperatures tied to global warming, about aone-degree global average temperature rise in the last century, have widely contributed to recent runs of horrible weather:
- In 1950, U.S. record breaking hot weather days were as likely as cold ones. By 2000, they were twice as likely, and in 2011 they are three times more likely, so far. By the end of the century they will be 50 times more likely, Meehl says.
- With global warming’s higher temperatures packing about 4% more water into the atmosphere, total average U.S. snow and rainfall has increased by about 7% in the past century, says the study. The amount of rain falling in the heaviest 1% of cloudbursts has increased 20%, leading to more flooding.
- Early snow melt, and more rain rather than snow, has led to water cycle changes in the western U.S. in river flow, winter air temperature, and snow pack from 1950 to 1999. The effects are up to 60% attributable to human influence.
The report also quotes Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters,Donald Wuebles of the University of Illinois, and NASA scientist (and advisor to this series) Gavin Schmidt.
USA Today’s graph, above, is a take off on the now-famous graph from UCAR and Gerald Meehl, showing how the ratio of high temperature records to low temp records has changed over recent decades in the US.
Meehl himself explains below:
Vergano’s article is about as clear and balanced an article on the relation between climate change and extreme events as I have seen so far this season – and an example of what the mainstream media is mostly not doing in response to one of the most catastrophic series of weather events in recorded history.
Nice article. The graphic at the top describes the trend very well; the temperature “baseline” is going up. Winter still exists, but the overall year is warmer than it would have been without greenhouse gas emissions.
Wow, Meehl’s model shows a 20:1 ratio in 2050 and 50:1 ratio in 2100? I can’t imagine a world like that.
Nice, I think good to applaud good coverage as well as criticize bad. As the saying goes, “catch them doing good.”
Anyone who observes the weather on a more then causal basis, knows something is changing. In Connecticut we have seen every precipitation event in winter, spring, summer and Autumn become more intense. Storms produce more rain or snow.
With Greenhouse gases increasing at 10,000 times forcing in the past- its going to become even more ”weird’ and violent.
You can only hope that you are not in the bulls eye when the next event takes place.
Greenhouse gases are increasing at 10,000 times forcing compared to what past event? I was under the impression we were increasing at roughly 200x the PETM. Either way, the increase is WAY too fast for comfort. I’m just curious which past event you are referring to.
I can second the notion that the weather has been noticeably weird. A few Fridays back, my city experienced a localized flash flood that drowned four people and submerged a whole line of cars on a busy stretch of road. It was described as a 100 year event for that watershed. Fortunately, people are talking about revamping the roadway to better cope with an event like that. This past spring the rain was incredibly consistent in my neck of the woods. Every day we sent more water down the Ohio River to flood the folks along the Mississippi (sorry about that, our dam reservoirs were full). I recall the winter of 2007 was “shorts and t-shirt” weather through most of December and January (really weird). Other winters have seen consistent snowfall akin to the consistent rainfall of the spring. I guess our climate is to become wetter at the expense of a drier climate in the southwest and great plains.
Anyway, we’ll see if my observations coincide with a trend. In the meantime, it isn’t fun being in the global test tube for this experiment we are running.
Good to see proper global-warming coverage by mainstream media. Maybe we will finally see some decent policy to curtain production of CO2.