drought Archives - Green Path

weather-crazy

Just over a month ago I wrote about Australia’s Warmest Year On Record and ended the post by saying:

None of the above is necessarily due to global warming but it is all entirely consistent with global warming, and we can expect that weather like this will become normal as global warming progresses. Bearing in mind that this year represents, as the BoM says, temperatures [only] 1.2 C* above the baseline and medium-term predictions are in the range of 2 – 6 C above the baseline, I think we should be more worried than most of us are; but I will deal with those issues on their own in another post as soon as I can find time.

Continue reading “Global warming brings wild weather”

For a while now the climate scientists have been warning that global warming isn’t simply a matter of the weather getting a little warmer everywhere. Rather, the warming will vary from place to place and be accompanied by changes of weather patterns, especially rainfall. That is already happening. I have mentioned extreme weather events here before over the last year or so, and in fact the last few months have seen a cluster of extreme events which are causing great suffering across the Northern hemisphere.

Floods in North Korea, China and Japan.
Floods in Papua New Guinea.
Floods in the UK over summer, even leading to concerns about whether the Olympics could proceed successfully.
Drought in the USA. One of its smallest impacts, but one that shows the global reach of local events, is an increase in the price of chicken meat in Australia.
All of these followed an unusually cold winter in Europe.

We know that none of these can be ascribed to climate change with any certainty but there is a growing body of knowledge (e.g. IPCC) which shows that we can confidently give the odds that a particular event would have happened without global warming, and the experts are quoting high odds against any of these happening under our old weather patterns. The combined odds against all of them happening by chance are infinitesimal.

Continue reading “Extreme weather around the world”