1 July 2015, The Guardian, More evidence that global warming is intensifying extreme weather: A new study finds that global warming is causing weather whiplash. Just this week, a new article appeared in the journal Nature that provides more evidence of a connection between extreme weather and global warming. This falls on the heels of last week’s article which made a similar connection. So, what is new with the second paper? A lot. Extreme weather can be exacerbated by global warming either because the currents of atmosphere and oceans change, or it can be exacerbated through thermodynamics (the interaction of heat, energy, moisture, etc.). Last week’s study dealt with just the thermodynamics. This week’s study presents a method to deal with both. The authors, Daniel Horton, Noah Diffenbaugh and colleagues used a new technique to tease apart the complex influences of warming on changes to atmospheric circulation. Read More here
Tag Archives: Extreme Events
26 June 2015, CBS, California drought fueling wildfire flames: California firefighters are battling a new wildfire. The Sterling fire broke out Thursday in the San Bernardino Mountains, where firefighters have been battling flames for over a week. It has already burned at least 100 acres. It’s one of the more than 2,500 fires that have broken out in California so far this year, and gusty winds and drought conditions are fueling the flames. New data show the drought is designated as “extreme” or “exceptional” in more than 70 percent of California. That gives firefighters a new obstacle this year: searching for water.
Flying over the parched hills of Southern California, it’s clear how four years of drought has taken its toll, reports CBS News correspondent John Blackstone. “Normally at this time of year, we’d be seeing green and wildflowers as far as we can see. But because of the drought, we’re seeing brown, dry fuel that has no moisture in it at all,” Orange County fire Capt. Dave Lopez said. Lopez pointed to hills where a small fire could quickly grow into an inferno. The landscape is so dry, fires burn hotter and spread faster, making early attack from the air essential. But just as the drought has made the landscape flammable, it’s also dried up many of the water sources firefighters depend on to do their job. Read More here
22 June 2015, The Carbon Brief, Climate change attribution studies are asking the wrong questions, study says. Scientists are calling for a rethink in the way we seek to understand how climate change affects extreme weather. The latest in so-called attribution studies is to study each individual event by itself, looking for how climate change may have made it stronger or more likely. But a new paper says the methods used in many of these studies underestimate the influence of climate change, and suggests a new approach to identify the “true likelihood of human influence”.
One of the first studies to attribute a single extreme weather event to climate change was published just over a decade ago. Researchers showed that climate change had doubled the chances of the record heatwave Europe experienced in 2003. In the years that followed, many more studies have aimed to provide answers on how climate change is affecting our most brutal weather. But while scientists have been able to attribute events caused by temperature extremes, linking other extreme events like storms and heavy rainfall events has proved more difficult, says a new paper in Nature Climate Change. Read More here