Man-made climate change brings with it extreme weather
In the past year, different and distant cities were flooded with floods, such as Nashville in Tennessee and Ushera in Pakistan. An extreme heat wave ignited peat fires in Moscow and enveloped the city in smoke. A drought in northeastern China destroyed the wheat crop. The snow buried considerable parts of the USA under it, and caused the roof of the football stadium to collapse. "It is therefore appropriate to ask: Is the human influence on the climate somehow related to the severe weather that afflicts us?" asked Oxford University physicist Miles Allen at a recent press conference.
It is not easy to answer this question. But now, after years of research, scientists are beginning to reveal a human fingerprint in many extreme weather patterns. In a study whose results were published in February 2011 in the journal Nature, scientists examined the daily amount of precipitation measured at more than 6,000 measuring stations between the years 1951 and 1999. They found an increase in the incidence of extreme precipitation events, such as storms during which more than 100 millimeters of rain fell in 24 hours. This increase cannot be reconciled with natural fluctuations in the climate, but corresponds to patterns emerging from computer models that predict climate changes due to an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases. In other words, it seems that man tipped the scales in favor of extreme weather.
According to this study, record-breaking storms of rain and snow will continue to occur, although it is not clear at what intensity and when. The British Meteorological Service, the American Center for Atmospheric Research and other partners have made it their goal to bridge this information gap by creating ongoing assessments of the human contribution to extreme weather phenomena in a particular season, just as the change in global temperature is measured today.
However, it is still difficult to link a particular extreme weather event to human-caused climate change. "We don't believe that human influence is the cause of all these events," explains Francis Zwiers from the University of Victoria in Canada, who headed the study published in Nature. And yet, it seems that we cannot escape the results.
2 תגובות
The anti-science ideology of the American right is so opaque that it doesn't even consider the facts
Weather changes are not only man-made, the weather is affected by millions of parameters, that is why it is so difficult to predict it accurately, the solar weather in the sun is more influential than any human influence and therefore the world is warming since the end of the last ice age.