Climate Change Loads the Dice for More Extreme Weather

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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-change-increases-extreme-weather-events


Climate change is changing the odds of some extreme weather events, according to new research by government scientists in the United States and Britain.

Back-to-back La Niña cycles helped create the scorching heat wave that drove Texas' record-breaking drought last year, but climate change also played a role, the researchers report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

That type of severe heat wave is 20 times more likely to occur during a La Niña today than it was during a La Niña in the 1960s, say researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.K. Meteorological Office.

"What this is saying is it's a combination of La Niña variability, but there's also an additional component from longer-term warming," said study co-author Tom Peterson, a climate scientist at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center.