Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumScientists attribute extreme weather to man-made climate change
human activity on the planets climate systems for the first time. Photograph: Alamy
Climate change researchers have been able to attribute recent examples of extreme weather to the effects of human activity on the planet's climate systems for the first time, marking a major step forward in climate research.
The findings make it much more likely that we will soon within the next few years be able to discern whether the extremely wet and cold summer and spring so far experienced in the UK this year are attributable to human causes rather than luck, according to the researchers.
Last year's record warm November in the UK the second hottest since records began in 1659 was at least 60 times more likely to happen because of climate change than owing to natural variations in the earth's weather systems, according to the peer-reviewed studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, and the Met Office in the UK. The devastating heatwave that blighted farmers in Texas in the US last year, destroying crop yields in another record "extreme weather event", was about 20 times more likely to have happened owing to climate change than to natural variation.
Attributing individual weather events, such as floods, droughts and heatwaves, to human-induced climate change rather than natural variation in the planet's complex weather systems has long been a goal of climate change scientists. But the difficulty of separating the causation of events from the background "noise" of the variability in the earth's climate systems has until now made such attribution an elusive goal.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/10/extreme-weather-manmade-climate-change
KansDem
(28,498 posts)Like the WSJ:
WSJ Publishes Op-Ed From 16 Climate Deniers, Refused Letter From 255 Top Scientists
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, sixteen prominent global warming deniers with scientific backgrounds such as tobacco apologist Richard Lindzen of MIT and ExxonMobil executive Roger Cohen concede that manmade carbon dioxide emissions have a warming effect on the planet, but argue that the effect is small and nothing to panic about. All the other scientists in the world who believe the science are part of a conspiracy to intimidate people like themselves, they write, just as Soviet biologists who believed in genes were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.
As climate scientist Peter Gleick reports at his Forbes.com blog, those other scientists include 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences who wrote a letter about the scientific threat of climate change for the Wall Street Journal but were turned down:
The most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal with respect to manmade climate change is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a scientifically accurate essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down. The National Academy of Sciences is the nations pre-eminent independent scientific organizations. Its members are among the most respected in the world in their fields. Yet the Journal wouldnt publish this letter. Instead they chose to publish an error-filled and misleading piece on climate because 16 so-called experts aligned with their bias signed it. This may be good politics for them, but it is bad science and it is bad for the nation.
The NAS letter was eventually published by Science magazine.
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http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/01/30/414277/wsj-publishes-op-ed-from-16-climate-deniers-refused-letter-from-255-top-scientists/