While scientists and politicians have argued over the warming of the planet - and human role in that change - there has been a long-standing agreement that individual weather events could not be tied to a larger global warming trends. Extreme weather events - both sides have acknowledged - happened, happens and will happen regardless of warming trends.
James Hansen, the NASA scientist behind the new study, has himself been hesitant to attribute any specific weather event to climate change. Instead, since the 1980s, Hansen has said increasing global temperatures would "load the dice" or make extreme weather events more likely.
Hansen's new study isn't based on climate models or projections of the Earth's climate. The study examines the math of real climate data and the author concludes that global warming has been responsible for a number of extreme weather events.Â
"This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened," Hansen wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. "Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change." Read the full report here.
Source: by Taylor Kuykendall, Reporter, Grounded, State Journal.
