Freakish weather disasters — from the sudden October snowstorm in the north-east US to the record floods in Thailand — are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press.The final draft of the report from a panel of the world's top climate scientists paints a wild future for a world already weary of weather catastrophes costing billions of dollars. The report says costs will rise and perhaps some locations will become "increasingly marginal as places to live."
The report from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be issued in a few weeks, after a meeting in Uganda. It says there is at least a two-in-three probability that weather extremes have already worsened because of man-made greenhouse gases.
This marks a change in climate science from focusing on subtle changes in daily average temperatures to concentrating on the harder-to-analyse freak events that grab headlines, cause economic damage and kill people. The most recent bizarre weather extreme, the pre-Halloween snowstorm in the US, is typical of the damage climate scientists warn will occur – but it's not typical of the events they tie to global warming.
"The extremes are a really noticeable aspect of climate change," said Jerry Meehl, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "I think people realise that the extremes are where we are going to see a lot of the impacts of climate change." more
1 comments (read or post your own):
the earth spins at 1600 kilometres an hour.
the earth races around the sun at 107,000 kilometres an hour.
as the moon circles the earth it lifts the seas causing high tides, so too does the sun.
what we don't see is the effect it also has on the continents.
Now if any one can stop the earth from spinning set it up on it's axis, cool the earth's interior, stop the tectonic plates from bashing against each other and causing volcanoes, and stop the sun from heating up the oceans, maybe then we could start to control the climate.
So it's quite simple.
Like the vexing problem of whether the glass is half full or half empty depends on your perspective.
I look up at the sky and I see natural weather variability and I think how exciting it is that the weather is never the same.
It is both exciting and beautiful.
Never the same show twice.
Climate change is natural and pompous man will never affect it.
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