Is Extreme Weather a Result of Global Warming? (POLL)

A dog stands at the entrance of a damaged house after a landslide Brazil. Flooding has killed at least 800 people so far this year, the worst disaster of its kind in Brazil's history.

/ AP Photo/Felipe Dana

This post, written by Solana Pyne, originally appeared on GlobalPost.

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RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- In the past year, every continent except Antarctica has seen record-breaking floods. Rains submerged one-fifth of Pakistan, a thousand-year deluge swamped Nashville and storms just north of Rio caused the deadliest landslides Brazil has ever seen.

Southern France and northern Australia had floods, too. Sri Lanka, South Africa, the list goes on.

And while no single weather event can be linked definitively to global climate change, a growing number of scientists say these extreme events represent the face of a warming world.

"Any one of these events is remarkable," said Jay Gulledge, senior scientist for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "But all of this taken together could not happen without the extra heat that's in the ocean. It defies common sense to overlook that link."

That link works more or less like this. Concentrations of greenhouse gases are the highest the earth has seen in 15 million years. These gases trap heat, warming both the air and the oceans. Warmer oceans give off more moisture, and a warmer atmosphere can hold more of it in suspension. The more moisture in the air, the more powerful storms tend to grow. When these supercharged weather systems hit land, they don't just turn into rain or snow, they become cyclones, blizzards and floods.

"There is a lot of tropical moisture in the atmosphere that is getting transported over very long distances and is dropping out in various places around the world in dramatic fashion," Gulledge said.

Last year tied with 2005 as the warmest on record, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And floods in 2010 weren't the only extremes.

In Russia, 15,000 people died during a record heat wave. Australia suffered its warmest summer on record. Pakistan witnessed its hottest day in history, as did Los Angeles. The U.S. East Coast has struggled under unusually heavy snows for two winters running. The Brazilian Amazon suffered one of the worst droughts in its history. And even as the Brazilian government recovered the bodies of those killed by record storms in the state of Rio de Janeiro, it trucked drinking water to cities in the north blighted by drought.

Weather like this matches the predictions of numerous recent climate studies. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted that severe droughts and heavy rains were already on the rise in many parts of the world, and linked them to the surge in greenhouse gases. A study published last year by the National Academy of Sciences predicted an increase in heavy rainfall of somewhere between 3 and 10 percent for every Celsius degree of warming. Each additional degree would also cause the amount of area burned by wildfires in North America to double or quadruple, according to the same report.

"If you think it's bad now -- when we've had about 0.7 degrees Celsius of warming -- wait until we've had 3 or 4," Gulledge said. "There's absolutely no reason to think it will not continue getting worse and worse and worse."

Some scientists are starting to worry that natural weather patterns, which played a role in some of the biggest recent flooding, are also showing effects of human-driven climate change. This year's rainy season in Australia is linked to a phenomenon called a La Nina, which occurs when water in the equatorial region of the Pacific is cooler than normal.

La Nina and its warm-water counterpart, El Nino, are part of a natural pattern of ocean currents and atmospheric winds that redistribute heat by moving it from one part of the world to another. Even as La Nina and El Nino influence the overall climate, much like organs in a body, they may remain vulnerable to system-wide shocks, said Paul Mayewski, director of the Climate Change Institute at The University of Maine.

So far scientists have found no definitive link between rising greenhouse gases and changes to El Nino and La Nina events. But Mayewski thinks that might be changing.

"This is a naturally occurring phenomenon," Mayewski said. "That doesn't mean it can't be impacted by humans."

He is investigating whether greenhouse gases may have so disturbed the balance of heat that natural patterns, like El Nino and La Nina, may begin to speed up and intensify.

"We may very well be changing this El Nino-La Nina system much faster and more radically," Mayewski said. "It's a naturally occurring system that we may be giving a lot more push to."

And, if he's right, that could mean even less stable, more extreme weather in the foreseeable future.

For some agencies working to help countries prevent and recover from natural disasters, there's no question that they're getting worse.

"There was never any doubt in our mind that, in reality, the frequency and severity and number of people that were affected kept increasing," said Margareta Wahlstrom, the United Nations' assistant secretary general for disaster risk reduction.

In an increasingly urbanized world, people, goods and infrastructure are concentrated, meaning that each natural disaster has the potential to cause an unprecedented amount of damage.

"The losses are increasing very rapidly," Wahlstrom said. "Today is decision time. We know what the risks are. We can see the trends."

With the effects of global warming already manifest, Wahlstrom said, countries need to improve disaster preparation even as they negotiate to cut emissions that cause the problem in the first place.

For a country such as Brazil, that means developing early warning systems for heavy rains and better evacuation plans, as well as moving people out of the most vulnerable neighborhoods. The government has pledged to do just that in response to the recent tragedies.

Tackling the problem after the fact is devastatingly expensive. Officials in cities destroyed by the floods here say it will take a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild. And a recent study predicts that a warming climate could cost Latin American countries about 1 percent of their GDP every year from now until 2100.

While natural disasters tend to be more deadly in developing countries, this last year has shown extreme weather can strike planet-wide.

"The attitude that many of us probably have lived with for decades, because we've lived in fairly safe countries, is that disasters are something that happens to others," Wahlstrom said. "That is no longer viable."

[desmodia]

Hey, climate change deniers,
The evidence is becoming more visible to the general public week by week. What are you professional deniers going to do for extra income when even the oil companies stop paying you by the post to pretend, twist, and lie?

[stevenawhite1965]

Desmodia, how sad. "Professional Deniers"? Time to wake up from your far left, Gaia worshipping, George Soros inspired, delusions to REALITY! The VAST majority of average, ordinary Americans have doubts and questions about this because "Global Warming" STILL doesn't pass the sniff test! And if there's one thing we can't stand, it's getting BS'd! The earth DOES have climatological temperature cycles. The sun DOES dramatically affect the earth's temperatures, again with cyclical regularity. People will NOT go back to riding bicycles and living without air conditioning. IF the planet does heat up, we will adapt. That's what we are best at. But this extreme left, America hating, capitalism hating, fantasy is failing because people can see it for what it is, a manipulative lie. And guess what? I wasn't paid to write this!

[Witsendnj]

http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2011/01/kitchen-table-comic.html

[Arno_Arrak]

First a correction. NOAA's temperature curve is wrong. Satellite data show that 1998 was warmer by a long shot than either 2005 or 2010. Not only that but their curve exaggerates the warming by a good tenth of a degree Celsius. The only warming within the last thirty one years was a short spurt that started in 1998, raised global temperature by a third of a degree in four years, and then stopped. There was no warming either before or after it. It was not greenhouse warming either and its cause was warm water carried across the ocean by the super El Nino of 1998. A third of a degree may not seem much but it is fully half of what has been assigned to the entire twentieth century. This, and not an imaginary greenhouse effect caused the first decade of this century to be unusually warm. While warm, there was no further warming during this period which ended with a La Nina cooling in 2008. This signified the resumption of ENSO oscillations that had been interrupted by the super El Nino of 1998. Model makers had no idea why there was cooling because all their models predicted warming. Expect these oscillations to continue and don't expect any catastrophic warming the model-makers are still trying to push on us. As to the unusual weather, each and every weather system always has its cause and there is no blanket "cause" like global warming that they can all can be blamed on. Even the unusual warmth of the first decade does not fit because this warmth preceded the weather by years. The only warming still going on today is in the Arctic and that one is not greenhouse either. It is caused by warm ocean currents that started to flow north and melt the ice at the beginning of the twentieth century.

[Sean2829]

Have you ever noticed that climate scientists predictions are quite different than their after the fact rationalizations? We are coming out of the deepest solar minimum in at least a century, the Pacific Decadonal Oscillaton just turned negative and we end up with strong blocking patterns that we've not seen since the mid 20th century...when the PDO was last negative. Face it, those crazy, poorly educated meteorologists who have been saying for years the late 20th century warming was part of a natural cycle called this transition correctly. The climate consensus may by myopic but the main steam media doesn't have their reputation tied up in this theory. It's time to become journalists again and report both sides of the debate.

[cbs4111]

Listen, does this make any sense to you at all? Summer temperatures are 50 to 80 degrees hotter than winter. If storms were driven by temperature increases alone, then summer storms would be hugely greater than winter storms. You wouldn't even see a storm in the winter, but you do, and huge summer storms would happen constantly. But these kinds of storms; blizzards, flooding, and high winds happen throughout the year. When it's hot, warm, and cold. We all know that. Now, prior to 1998, global warming was proceeding at about 0.2 degrees F per decade (there actually has been little or no warming in the last 12 years). The total increase in the last 100 years is 1 degree, and much of that happened between 1910 and 1940. If an 80 degree temperature increase doesn't always cause huge, constant storms, then how could a 1 degree increase in the last 100 years (let alone a 0.2 degree) be noticeable at all?

Nope. It doesn't work like this. It's the temperature DIFFERENCES that matter. Warm moist air moves, and when it hits colder air that's when preciptation and storms happen. We all know that. The equator is and has always been much hotter than mid- and high latitudes. The moist air moving north (in the Northern Hemisphere) creates storms when it hits colder air.

Unfortunately for this Global Warming alarmist theory, IT'S THE TEMPERATURE GRADIENT THAT MATTERS, NOT THE ABSOLUTE TEMPERATURE. And CO2 has made the gradient SMALLER, NOT LARGER. We know that because the North Pole has warmed more than the equator, that means the temperature difference between the equator and high latitudes has actually decreased so the gradient has decreased. We know that an increase in storms and storm intensity has NOT happened because the world-wide accumulated cyclone energy has not shown anything but a random trend over the last 75 years.

This article is just more propaganda trying to convince the public that global warming is much more of a problem than it really is. Global warming wouldn't even be known without many extremely precise temperature measurements averaged over decades - you would have to stare at your backyard thermometer for 10 years to see the average move a tiny fraction of the smallest division you can see, an imperceptable increase in 10, 20, even 30 years. Plus, the Earth's temperature has changed much more in the past than in the last 100 years - look up Climate Optimum, Medieval Warming Period, Dark Ages, and the Little Ice Age.

It's time to bring this alarmist scam to a close.

We can only hope that the majority of people stop to think about this long enough to overcome all the fear mongering and outright lying.

[Jaylah54]

Oh, c'mon, ever good right-winger knows that climate change exists only in the imaginations of "those libruls."