. The heat settled heavily over the South and Midwest as well. Both Texas and Oklahoma experienced their warmest month on record.)
A summer heat wave left much of the U.S. sweltering in July 2011. On July 22, many cities from Virginia to Maine broke temperature records with highs between 38 to 42 degrees Celsius (100 to 108 Fahrenheit). The heat settled heavily over the South and Midwest as well. Both Texas and Oklahoma experienced their warmest month on record.
Image: NASA/LARC
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.
La Niña's influence was also evident on many of the weather extremes during a year that saw an onslaught of natural disasters, including a record-breaking 14 $1 billion-plus extreme weather events in the United States.
"In addition to East African drought, La Niña also played a role in droughts that occurred thousands of miles away in Mexico and southwestern United States, among the worst on record in both countries," said Jessica Blunden, another NCDC climate scientist.
And the weather pattern also helped cool the planet briefly, though 2011 still ranks among the 15 warmest years on record, NOAA said yesterday in its annual "State of the Climate" report, compiled by 378 scientists in 48 countries.
'Cooler' becomes a relative term
Conditions were unusually warm compared with other years when La Niña was present. While 2011 stands as the coolest year since 2008, "the word 'cooler' is actually relative," Blunden said.
The global average temperature last year still exceeded the average temperature recorded between 1981 and 2010 -- the three warmest decades since record-keeping began 130 years ago.
"Long-term trends are continuing to show what we'd expect in a warmer world," said NCDC Director Tom Karl.
Those trends are especially pronounced in the Arctic, which continues to warm roughly twice as fast as the planet's lower latitudes. Last year, the northwestern Alaska town of Barrow experienced a record 86 consecutive days in which the daily low temperature did not dip below freezing.
"The Arctic is clearly experiencing the impacts of a prolonged and intensified warming trend," said Martin Jeffries, Arctic science adviser to the Office of Naval Research.
This year, the lower 48 states are also sizzling. Yesterday, NOAA said the first six months of the year were the warmest January to June in the contiguous United States since record-keeping began in 1895.
Meanwhile, the level of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere continues to climb. The global average level of carbon dioxide broke the 390 parts per million barrier for the first time last year, an increase of 2.10 ppm from 2010. Levels of methane and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere also rose.
But determining the role climate change has played in individual extreme weather events is tricky, researchers said.
"A lot of people want to know shortly after an extreme event, what were the causes of it? How are these things changing over time?" said Peterson. "But this is an evolving science."
While it's true that scientists can't say with certainty whether climate change caused a given weather event, that is the wrong question to ask, experts said.
When climate gives events an extra push
Instead, they are examining whether climate change is changing the odds of natural disasters like floods, droughts, heat waves and hurricanes.
See what we're tweeting about
27 Comments
Add CommentInteresting. It was not long ago that it was categorically stated by climate researchers that it was impossible to tie any discrete weather event to AGW.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt looks like that wasn't good enough for the Alarmists. Why is that? My guess is that the Alarmists are down to grasping at something, anything to continue to scare people and have now stooped to promoting ideas that their own researchers have long considered discarded as outlandish and impossible.
Time to change the name of the crisis again. The last name is dog-eared and shop-worn. Call it what it is "Man Made Climate Alarmism". Time for some truth in advertising.
Statistically, the last heat wave doesn't even rise above the background of white noise, let alone qualify as an extreme event.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/10/hell-and-high-histogramming-an-interesting-heat-wave-puzzle/
Is it any wonder that people trust climatologists about as much as they trust their local loan shark. Things were 'unusually' warm in the coolest year for three decades? Seriously? We've had three decades of warm temperatures. When does that become usual? And resorting to averages to explain away the cooling? Of course it exceeds the average. It would be a mathematical miracle if it didn't. Meanwhile, the experience of two severe winters in Britain makes it less likely that it will occur again while the occurrence of other phenomena makes them more likely? (Any high school student should be able to point out the disparity between event and probability anyway!)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNow there may be global warming (although I'm inclined to doubt the global part), there almost certainly is climate change, but the point is that if you don't know what's actually going on, you certainly won't be helped in any way by this kind of stab in the dark 'science' and the obfuscation with which its 'results' are presented. We are being lied to, partly by commission, mostly by omission and, frankly, bone-headed incompetence! The truth I continue to suspect is that nobody has any real idea what the heck is going on. How refreshing it would be to see some weather science which simply stated the facts and left out the speculation.
It's raining, it's pouring, this fact may be boring, but now it's writ, it's clear that it, can't be changed in the morning!
@Shoshin:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCiting a blog by a non-scientist with an agenda makes you look like an idiot.
There is nothing controversial or unusual about the predictions of increasingly extreme weather patterns due to increasing energy in the oceans and atmosphere. It's got to happen. More energy means either more heat energy will be observed and more kinetic energy will be observed. Thermodynamics is well understood. This is simply physics that anyone with even a modicum of high physics should understand.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCause and effect in global weather patterns are harder to predict since dynamic systems do not have simple cause and effect scenarios as most if not all factors are not under our control under laboratory conditions.
Can events be predicted? Well, yes, within reason. If a set of tornados have spawned twenty miles from my home traveling at 20 mph in my direction, I can predict quite accurately that I'm going to see significant storm events within the hour with a probability approaching 100%. This not magic, but common sense. Can I predict the tornadoes will touch down at my home? No, but the probability of that random event certainly has increased. And if the event is "more tornadoes will be spawned along its path in the next hour" the probability is not 100% but maybe 90%. Again, just common sense.
It's no different when predicting more global weather and climate events, which Shoshin and Curmudgeon are clueless about. It's really quite trivial to understand.
'loads the dice for....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow! Quite the 'scientific' approach to science...not.
Good article. It's been described as loading the dice. It's actually pushing the needle farther into the red zone, and predicting the rate of consequences.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Tony T Watt latest counterpunch has the usual pillow-feathers in it. Eschenbach does a mathic trick - selling a normal Poisson distribution- by eliminating the underlying warming trend (refer back to the NSDC baseline "if there was no warming" ... nudge nudge wink wink.
It's the usual sliderule-show trick - Lucia did the kind of thing, and managed to blaze a path to ... a 1 in 2,000 chance. Wow, that's hardly worth mentioning.
Tony tops it off focusing on Jeff Masters ... when he was quoting a NSDC number (not from Tony's "lets play nice" face ... from his other face).
In the chaos known as weather, the heat bursts continue - western Europe in the middle of the last decade; eastern Europe and Russia in recent years; and now in North America.
It may not get more extreme ... and it may not matter. It's now enough to impact global GDP. The pro-pollutionists lost their bet that we could make future generations pay for our garbage dump. It's coming out of your wallet in food prices, national disaster taxes, and adaptation costs. The new victory hand-sign is a big L.
I genuflect to your obvious intellectual superiority. You win. I'm convinced. What was I thinking?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow silly of me to post science on this website.
SCIAM has been a fact free zone for years. You'd think I'd know better.
My apologies.
"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."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoes anyone know what this sentence means? Is it a safe claim even when "severe" remains undefined? Would not a 2000% increase in heat wave frequency over c.1965 leave little room for rain?
This doesn't sound like science to me. --AGF
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWeather is what happens today, climate is over time averages like 10 yrs.
Quite a few 10 yr periods plus many millions more from geology show clearly we are changing the climate at a faster and faster rate.
Here in Fla 100's of sq miles of land has become water and too many islands I've known and played on as a kid are just plain gone. The Everglades alone has lost 100's of sq miles and a lot more has changed from fesrh water swamps to salt water marsh.
Just this last tropical storm Debbie took away probably 20 sq miles of beaches because the sea is higher. Many places that had 1-200' beaches are now just seawalls in a couple days.
The conservative 12'' rise in the next 40 yrs will take out large parts of coastal area including cities from Miami to NYC and beyond.
In the last 30 yrs animals, plants have moved north 2-300 miles and the pine beetle that use to die off in winter now kills all the way into Canada from the lower SW and the cause of much of the out of control wildfire there.
Yet the luddites are still yelling the world is flat.
11. jerryd
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this04:00 PM 7/12/12
The citrus belt used to include the Florida panhandle, but as the freezes grow more frequent and intense they've moved further south. The increasing freezes are typically blamed on decreasing swamps as landfill encroaches on them. Which is to say, your disappearing islands are exceptions to the rule.
Likewise your disappearing beaches. The storm giveth and the storm taketh away, but sea level rise is negigible in the equation: formerly maybe 2mm/year; nothing in recent years. Organic detritus accumulates at a higher rate.
And groundwater depletion is the main culprit as far as saltier water goes, not the tides, not rising sea level, but greater evaporation due to aerated irrigation.
Decades of fire suppression and more recent logging prohibition combined with cyclical drought has led to a few bad fire seasons. Only the most gullible and ignorant blame these disasters on a little CO2. Flat earthers indeed. You know nothing. --AGF
@geojellyroll: "load the dice..." is colloquial in the words used but scientific as to its meaning. Science is statistical because nature is statistical. Events do not happen with certainty depending on how the events are defined. "Load the dice..." is a cute but poor metaphor since it implies that the probability of the events are equally likely, which we assume for dice with the probability of 1/6 for all outcomes. That is, for a fair die, the probability distribution is the Uniform Distribution. The probability of natural events most often does not follow the Uniform distribution. Say, the probability of a human being born with 3 arms or 4 arms is not the same as being born with 2 arms. Hair color, eye color also do not follow a uniform distribution and it differs across different groups.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIsotopes of the elements are not uniformly distributed, neither is the location of electrons in their orbitals.
Thus, science is in part the study of the probabilities of aggregates of billions of small and each highly improbable random events.
The certainty that comes from this study is quite evident in the man-made world. Radios, tv, computers, cars, tires all do as we now expect and take for granted because of the aggregate of the random events are quite accurately understood and controlled.
14. LarryW
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisin reply to geojellyroll
05:31 PM 7/12/12
"The certainty that comes from this study is quite evident in the man-made world. Radios, tv, computers, cars, tires all do as we now expect and take for granted because of the aggregate of the random events are quite accurately understood and controlled."
Certainty? In climate prediction? Surely you are being sarcastic. --AGF
Shoshin,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article is not about tying discrete weather events to man made global warming; it's about showing that the odds of extreme weather are greater, due to man made global warming. It's still impossible to tie a discrete weather event to global warming but it's now possible to say that the discrete weather event was less likely to have happened without global warming.
I hope that those of you who keep thinking you know better than climate scientists are keeping a record of everything you have written so that your grandchildren can have a record of your foolishness to ponder. Whether i am right or wrong, at least my grandchildren will know that I based my views and decisions on the best available science at the time and that I was not so arrogant that I thought I knew better than the collective wisdom of all major scientific organizations today.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith climate like many things we cannot know with absolute certainty but if the models are correct the consequences are pretty grave, therefore if we error in our reactions to potential climate change, shouldn't we error on the side of caution? Just saying!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI feel sure that all those 'flat earthers' in the 1600's made sure that their grandchildren knew that they went along with the consensus of the majority also. Are their great, great, grandchildren the ones who blindly say 'we must follow the consensus' now?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article is about the radical eco-movement attempting to hijack science through casting daily weather occurrences as something scary.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf what I say is not true, then why is there a constant obsession with every heat wave, tornado, etc?
Perhaps there should be the same obsession with the boring everyday when nothing happens?
The OCD that the Alarmists present is nothing more than confirmation bias. Statistically, there is nothing happening. Boring, but that's the way it is.
"The article is about the radical eco-movement attempting to hijack science through casting daily weather occurrences as something scary."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you'd take your tinfoil hat off-- you might feel that it's getting warmer!
Seriously though, it's mainstream science that finds global warming to be something that is happening and mainstream science that is evermore tying global warming to our activities. There is no radical eco-movement trying to dominate your thoughts.
I didn't claim certainty of climate event, but your understanding of probabilities is limiting your understanding.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSimply, the more general (broad) an event is defined the higher its probability and conversely, the more specific the less probable.
From climatologists position, I believe they would be quite confident (perhaps even certain) that there will more extreme high temperature events in the future due to climate change, like breaking records. What scientists are seeing is the ratio of extreme highs to extreme lows is changing from 1-to-1 to 10-to-1. They have been predicting this ratio change for decades now, and it is happening.
They are not talking about this vaguely, but based on the typical variability, that ratio change is 3-4 or more standard deviations away from the mean of the historical ratios. That is, it's a trend and one that has been predicted. That is, it is getting far hotter and it is a global phenomena. This year, it's the midwest, last year, Europe, year before Australia, then Russia.
Are they predicting when the next mass heat wave will hit of a similar nature to the heat waves of the last 5 years.? I have not read that and it's unlikely they will -- that's too difficult. But they are predicting with some high confidence that there will be those extreme events, and the ratio of high events to low events will high.
21. Steve3
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisin reply to Shoshin
04:42 PM 7/13/12
You are obviously illiterate as far as CAGW skepticism goes. You need to get out a little, read a few books or blogs at least. Shoshin's claim is not conspiratorial speculation but very well documented history. Never heard of LaFramboise? Didn't think so. Steve McIntyre? Not a chance. The HarryReadme File? Probably not. Climategate? Oh yeah, you heard of that one, another rightwingnut conspiracy debunked--an evil hacker broke in to the private emails of innocent climate scientists, proven thrice over by their peers not less to be thus innocent.
Oh, and you should learn to distinguish between GW and AGW; until you do you are doomed to blabber nonsense.
--AGF
22. LarryW
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisin reply to agfosterjr
04:44 PM 7/13/12
Again, here's what the article said:
"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."
Here's what you said: "The certainty that comes from this study is quite evident in the man-made world. Radios, tv, computers, cars, tires all do as we now expect and take for granted because of the aggregate of the random events are quite accurately understood and controlled."
So you are claiming certainty for a claim which is so vague as to be incapable of testing. Like climate alarmism in general, it is not based on empirical, quantifiable observation. The propaganda caters to the non-scientist, the non-thinker. Get the pinheads to interpret every drastic bit of weather in GHG terms and they'll confess. They won't change their ways but they'll vote to be taxed for their lack of repentance. And believe it or not, there are those lined up to make good money on trading carbon tax credits. --AGF
Hummmm!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet's see.
More energetic gas solution. (we like to call that the atmosphere)
More energetic liquid mineral solution. (something we call oceans)
Nope, nothing going on here!
Boring....boring....boring........
Oh! Wait! There's something I like to call agriculture!
Stuff that in your gas fracking, clean coal portfolio.
Who holds your leash?
Ever heard of a little thing called the laws of thermodynamics and thought about how it may apply to the global economy?
We are a carbon based global energy economy.
Here, let me be helpful.
Just close your eyes and plug your ears and shout La La La La La....
That ought to make those pesky facts go away for sure. And be sure to say hi to the "wizard" behind the curtain for me. You know who I'm talking about. He's the one who hands you a check occasionally.
John Llewellyn's 2007 papers were on pretty shaky ground even before they were published, but now that the IPCC and Mann's hockey stick have been so thoroughly discredited the rug has been pulled out from under them (see http://www.llewellyn.co.nz/climatechange.pdf).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the above is the same Llewellyn he clearly is not paying attention. And if he another, he is just one more brainwashed dupe who thinks all skeptics are on big oil's payroll. It's pathetic that such ignoramuses imagine themselves to be informed in the subject, but more pathetic that they imagine big oil has any stake in promoting skepticism of anything--except maybe the value of windfall taxes.
--AGF
"There is nothing controversial or unusual about the predictions of increasingly extreme weather patterns due to increasing energy in the oceans and atmosphere."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes if the energy goes to the atmosphere. The heat content of the oceans is 1,000 times greater than the atmosphere. The latter accounts for 0.1% of earth's surface heat.
"From climatologists position, I believe they would be quite confident (perhaps even certain) that there will more extreme high temperature events in the future due to climate change, like breaking records."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes climate change whether natural or manmade and weather variability. See Roy Spencer's "Not that Remarkable" article.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2012/07/june-2012-u-s-temperatures-not-that-remarkable/#comments
This is what Dr. Cliff, a professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington, had to say about this particular study:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Before I go further, let me stress that I am believe that human-induced increases in greenhouse gases will cause the planet to warm significantly over the next century. The impacts could be both profound and serious. But exaggerating the impact of human-induced warming on what is happening now and in the past only serves to weaken the efforts of the meteorological community to provide information society needs to make rational decisions. If you cry wolf too many times and are proven wrong it is bad for credibility."
"First, the climate model is MUCH warmer and drier than reality…and the observations included the dry/warm conditions of the 1930s. A serious bias. Furthermore, the relationship between temperature and precipitation in the model and observations are VERY different…very different slope, with the model warming up much more quickly as precipitation declines than the observations. Clearly, the model is not simulating Texas climate very well."
"The bottom line: the actual observations show the temperatures over Texas have warmed by a perhaps a few tenths of a degree C since the mid-1960s, while the GCM model used by Rupp/Mote et al had major warming (1.5-2 C). Clearly, one can not trust the model and the conclusions reached in this paper are unsupportable."
"This situation is so disappointing on so many levels. It is disappointing the peer review process has allowed this paper to be published in a well known and prestigious journal. I have learned from personal experience that articles noting major global warming effects fly through the review process with only cursory examination, while papers with a more nuanced view of the issue are given a hard time."
http://cliffmass.blogspot.ca/
I don't think there is much more I can add, as I have been cautioning y'all, regarding many, who erroneously regard model output as data. It is not. GK
That's called the weather channel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this