Is a Sweltering Summer Proof of Global Warming?
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09/03/2010
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It’s hot. So hot that sweat beads on your forehead the minute you leave air-conditioned confines. So hot that ice cream melts down the sides of your cone faster than you can eat it. In fact, many of those in the East have sweated their way through June, July, and August, and this summer has been the hottest on record in New York City and Washington, D.C., according to the National Weather Service. Despite the heat, scientists say that tying the short-term hot spells to long-term climate change is an exasperating challenge.
“In most places, weather can change from minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day, and season-to-season. Climate, however, is the average of weather over time and space,” NASA writes about the difference between weather and climate. Just because this summer has been particularly hot—okay, really hot—doesn’t mean that it’s possible to attribute that weather to a warming climate.
Yet the five hottest years ever recorded since record keeping began in 1880 happened in the last decade, NASA reports, indicating that the earth is heating up.
“The long-term trend of warming is unmistakable, and at least one figure from last month can be said to add to the mounting evidence that climate change is firmly upon us,” an AFP article states. “June was the 304th consecutive month with a global surface temperature above the 20th-century average, the NOAA reported. The most recent month to dip below that average was February 1985, more than a quarter century ago.”
Those floods in Pakistan, the heat wave (and fires) in Russia, and that small island, er, iceberg that calved off of Greenland maybe just be indicators of our changing climate, but still scientists are reluctant to definitively say that the events can be attributed to global warming.
“If you ask me as a person, do I think the Russian heat wave has to do with climate change, the answer is yes,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher with NASA in New York, in a New York Times story. “If you ask me as a scientist whether I have proved it, the answer is no — at least not yet.”
Extreme weather and melting poles are things that scientists with the IPCC observed and connect with a warming planet, stating that it’s very likely that humans contributed the greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which are responsible for those consequences.
“The climate is changing,” said Jay Lawrimore, chief of climate analysis at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., in the Times article. “Extreme events are occurring with greater frequency, and in many cases with greater intensity.” And the heat? It’s “consistent with our understanding of how the climate responds to increasing greenhouse gases,” Lawrimore said.
On the Pew Center on Global Climate Change’s blog, Jay Gulledge, senior scientist and director of the science and impacts program there also offers some interesting comments when writing about extreme weather events in recent years.
“As every dutiful scientist does, I stopped short of blaming those individual weather events on global warming, but I am also careful to point out that it is scientifically unsound to claim that the confluence of extreme weather events in recent years is not associated with global warming,” he says.
A few hot months of sultry days and nights could be evidence of a larger trend, so we may just have to get used to the heat, extreme weather, and melting glaciers. Maybe an ice cream would help.
Comments
Ms Cosier, Perhaps the ice
Ms Cosier,
Perhaps the ice cream melting speaks more to the poor quality of ice cream you eat, then the hot summer. Perhaps you should use a cup to capture the spilled ice cream?
homogenisation of Temperatures.
Anybody who links extreme weather anomalies to a non existent spike in temperature data is scientifically illiterate.
If the data sets could be correctly analysed, it would show an insignificant background warming, this background warming is about to reverse and the world is entering a significant cooling phase.
MMCO2e driving world temperatures is advocated by a bunch of hacks who purport to be real scientists.
Mann and his mates at CRUTEMP are in breach of the ethics of scientific purity and integrity.
They have fudged, fiddled and manipulated data sets to prove a conjecture which was a political fiction in the outset, ie MM CO2 = GW.
Rubbish, there is no proof, only computer models show a link, we all know figures cannot lie but that liars can figure.
No mention then of the weather in the Southern hemisphere?
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Uruguay all have experienced record low temps' as have Australia, New Zealand and South Africa and look to the Antarctic sea ice which is at record levels....does this sound like runaway warming? Or are the alarmists as per usual being selective in the data and examples that they portray, what do you think?
Unsubstantiated Opinions
I would be willing to listen to you if you put forward one reference to your opinions, but you rant about a subject that you appear to have only a very little knowledge about.
The Medieval Warm Period Deniers
The overwhelming paleoclimate evidence from around the globe is that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), the Roman Warm Period and the Minoan Warming were synchronous, world wide and much warmer than today.
However, the MWP deniers, such as the IPCC, US EPA and the UK’s MET Office, will never admit the existence of the MWP because it means that their religious-like belief in AGW is exposed for the steaming pile of junk science that it truly is.
In total, climate change is complex and not well understood.
But this part is simple.
Since the world was warmer when CO2 levels were lower, CO2 cannot be the earth's temperature regulator.
In the past, the Earth was warmer than it is today; before the social and industrial advances that have made modern people the healthiest and most prosperous in history. MWP deniers want us to believe that plant friendly and life giving CO2 is a bad thing to better advance their meglomanical desire to both boss around the developed world and further impoverish the poor while pocketing a lot of taxpayer money along the way.
Useless, misguided attempts to control carbon are not the answer to the ever changing climate.There is only one answer to changes in climate that has ever worked for humanity.
That is adaptation.
One of the many links to the overwhelming Paleoclimate evidence of the global nature of the MWP is below.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
Re. Orkneygal false claim No
Re. Orkneygal false claim
No climate scientist has ever denied the existence of the medieval warm period. The evidence shows that the MWP did happen, but it does not show that it was warmer than today. Everyone I know at the IPCC US EPA and the UK MET Office know the evidence. You are simply making a false claim.
For the readers, she states:
Roman and Minoan are collocated regionally. They are not worldwide.
To illustrate this ask yourself this: Is Rome and Minoa also located in Canada, Africa, China, Australia, Russia, The Antarctic, The Arctic, Polynesia, Norway, and Brazil?
Or are they only located in the Mediterranean?
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