The lasting legacy of climate change will be heat. The land, the oceans, all of it. It’s the tie that binds and while the global average temperature is the defining metric, the increasing incidence of heat waves and longer lasting extreme heat is how the world will experience it.
All eight papers dealing with extreme heat events in this year’s Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society’s attribution report show a clear climate change signal that made them more likely, more hot or both. In fact, of the 22 studies scientists have submitted to the annual review over the past four years, only one didn’t find that climate change increased the odds or severity of extreme heat. Read more at: www.scientificamerican.com
GR: Single weather events, no matter how extreme or unusual, are difficult to connect to Climate-change/Global Warming. However, we can connect frequent events, and trends in average conditions, to climate change. They are the very definition of climate undergoing change. The unfortunate thing about CO2-caused climate change is that the change will be with us for centuries. Unlike a single storm, we can’t clean up and relax; the new conditions will not go away.
