New study links current events to
climate change
WASHINGTON (AP) — The relentless, weather-gone-crazy type of heat
that has blistered the United States and other parts of the world in
recent years is so rare that it can't be anything but man-made global warming, says a new
statistical analysis from a top government scientist.
A cumulonimbus, or anvil cloud Photo: National Geographic |
The research by a man
often called the "godfather of global warming" says that the
likelihood of such temperatures occurring from the 1950s through the 1980s was
rarer than 1 in 300. Now, the odds are closer to 1 in 10, according to the
study by NASA scientist James Hansen. He says that statistically what's
happening is not random or normal, but pure and simple climate change.
"This is not
some scientific theory. We are now experiencing scientific fact," Hansen
told The Associated Press in an interview.
Hansen is a scientist
at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and a professor at
Columbia University. But he is also a strident activist who has called for
government action to curb greenhouse gases for years. While his study was
published online Saturday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science, it is unlikely to sway opinion among the remaining climate change
skeptics.
However, several climate
scientists praised the new work.
In a blunt departure
from most climate research, Hansen's study — based on statistics, not the more
typical climate modeling — blames these three heat waves purely on global
warming:
—Last year's
devastating Texas-Oklahoma drought.
—The 2010 heat waves in Russia and
the Middle East, which led to thousands of deaths.
—The 2003 European
heat wave blamed for tens of thousands of deaths, especially among the elderly
in France.
The analysis was
written before the current drought and record-breaking temperatures that have
seared much of the United States this year. But Hansen believes this too is
another prime example of global warming at its worst.
Continued below . . .
Continued below . . .
Don't be alarmed by climate change alarmists
Relax with a good book
The new research
makes the case for the severity of global warming in a different way than most
scientific studies and uses simple math instead of relying on complex climate
models or an understanding of atmospheric physics. It also doesn't bother with
the usual caveats about individual weather events having numerous causes.
The increase in the
chance of extreme heat, drought and heavy downpours in certain regions is so
huge that scientists should stop hemming and hawing, Hansen said. "This is
happening often enough, over a big enough area that people can see it
happening," he said.
Scientists have
generally responded that it's impossible to say whether single events are
caused by global warming, because of the influence of natural weather
variability.
However, that
position has been shifting in recent months, as other studies too have
concluded climate change is happening right before our eyes.
Hansen hopes his new
study will shift people's thinking about climate change and goad governments
into action. He wrote an op-ed piece that appeared online Friday in the
Washington Post.
"There is still
time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious
time," he wrote.
The science in
Hansen's study is excellent "and reframes the question," said Andrew
Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia
who was a member of the Nobel Prize-winning international panel of climate
scientists that issued a series of reports on global warming.
"Rather than
say, 'Is this because of climate change?' That's the wrong question. What you
can say is, 'How likely is this to have occurred with the absence of global
warming?' It's so extraordinarily unlikely that it has to be due to global
warming," Weaver said.
Peter’s
Piece
We’ve heard all this before. It’s the same old recycled trash.
Climate has always been changing and always will change, but
the notion that the change is man-made is not logical. Climate change comes
naturally in cycles that can last months, years, decades, centuries and millenniums
and with much greater extremes than anything experienced during man’s time on
the planet.
Hansen talks about a supposed recent increase in extreme
weather events and I can understand that people will fall for that argument. He
is depending on peoples flawed memories of past events. We tend only to
remember one hot summer, one cold winter, or one severe tornado or other
serious happening.
But the fact remains that the highest temperatures ever
recorded date from the early twentieth century rather than the late twentieth
or twenty-first centuries. Similarly, world records for wind, floods, thunder storms and
tornadoes were recorded before most of us were born.
Hansen will call me a skeptic. I call him an alarmist.
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