On Wednesday, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a 594-page study suggesting that when it comes to weather observations since 1950, there has been a "change in some extremes," which stem in part from global warming.
The report — the product of a collaboration of 220 authors from 62 countries — makes distinctions among different phenomena. It shows there is "limited to medium evidence" that climate change has contributed to changes in flooding, for example, and there is "low confidence" that long-term hurricane trends over the past 40 years have been driven by the world's growing carbon output.
But the IPCC team projects that there is a 90 percent to 100 percent probability that sea level rise "will contribute to upward trends in extreme coastal high-water levels in the future."
Chris Field, who co-chairs the IPCC's Working Group II and serves as the director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said in an interview that although many uncertainties still exist when it comes to extreme weather, "We also know the risk people face is changing as a result of climate change."
Asking whether a particular extreme weather event can be blamed on human-caused global warming is the wrong question to ask, said Dim Coumou, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Read the full report here.
Source: by The Washington Post, Denverpost.com, Washington.
