More on Extreme Weather in a Warming Climate By ANDREW C. REVKIN
April 11, 9:47 a.m. | Updated with a reaction from Stefan Rahmstorf below |
Here’s a followup to my piece on how greenhouse-driven warming is loading the dice toward more hot weather extremes. In late March, the journal Nature: Climate Change published a “perspective” article by Dim Coumou and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research titled “A decade of weather extremes.” The piece, discussed by its authors on the RealClimate blog, was widely cited in news accounts and blogs as new scientific analysis.
The article summary is here:
The ostensibly large number of recent extreme weather events has triggered intensive discussions, both in- and outside the scientific community, on whether they are related to global warming. Here, we review the evidence and argue that for some types of extreme — notably heatwaves, but also precipitation extremes — there is now strong evidence linking specific events or an increase in their numbers to the human influence on climate. For other types of extreme, such as storms, the available evidence is less conclusive, but based on observed trends and basic physical concepts it is nevertheless plausible to expect an increase.
I sent the article around to some researchers working on these questions. Here are their reactions, along with another valuable assessment posted by Michael Tobis at Planet 3.0:
Jerry Roberts
