Climate change is driving heat waves around the world By Kate Sheppard Cross-posted from Huffington Post 30 Sep 2014 4:41 PM The record-setting heat wave in Australia last year was “largely attributable” to human-caused climate change, according to a synthesis report released Monday. Heat waves in Japan, Korea, China, and Europe were also “substantially influenced” by global warming, the report found. For the synthesis report, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 22 groups of scientists looked at 16 extreme weather events that took place in 2013. The paper concludes that at this time, it is more difficult to discern the human impact on other extreme events, such as the drought in California, extreme rainfall in Colorado, and an early-season blizzard in South Dakota. This is the third annual report on the connections between individual extreme weather events and climate change, led by scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The studies reached mixed conclusions about the California drought, which saw the driest 12-month period on record from 2013 into early 2014. Three studies looking at the links between Pacific Ocean surface temperatures and anomalies in the atmosphere were unable to find a direct tie to human-caused climate change, while another paper found that climate change was affecting atmospheric pressure patterns. Thus, the paper concludes, “implications for extremely low precipitation in California remain uncertain.” “A clear picture of how climate change influenced California’s drought has yet to emerge,” Stephanie Herring, the report’s lead editor and a scientist at NOAA, said in a call with reporters Monday. Click on image for more
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 00:53:29 +0000
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