Global Weirding: Extreme Climate Events Dominate Summer

[katty]

By: Lucia Graves

more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/12/global-weirding-extreme-c_n_680364.html

A heatwave in Russia is sparking wildfires that are driving residents from Moscow and devastating the country's wheat crop. A fifth of Pakistan is underwater and millions are deluged by floods in Asia. Another heatwave is torturing Mexico and the East Coast of the United States. An incomprehensibly large chunk of ice has broken off a glacier in Greenland, the most significant climate event there in 50 years.

Most scientists caution that no single event can be tied specifically to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But climate-change deniers quickly point to the first snowfall in winter as evidence against global warming. If that's the standard, the extreme climate events all across the globe must say something about whether climate change is already upon us. Indeed, the regularity of the events is beginning to undermine the descriptor "extreme". Extreme is the new normal.

"We're setting climate records at a record-setting pace," David Orr, a professor of environmental studies and politics at Oberlin College, told HuffPost. "More hottest hots, driest dries, wettest wets, windiest wind conditions. So it's all part of a pattern.

[Jefferson23]

1. Here in Ct. we are of course not suffering as so many around the world

are as the climate change impacts their very lives. But it has been very hot most of the summer with very little rain. Our garden, although
we water it, looks and feels like dust a good part of the time.

[starroute]

2. The extreme heat may also be depressing hurricane formation

Given how hot the water is in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, together with the end of the El Nino, the forecasters have been predicting this would be a bang-up hurricane season. But it hasn't been -- potential storms keep fizzling out or just failing to spin up. The Pacific isn't having much of a storm season, either.

Dr. Jeff Masters was suggesting in his Weather Underground blog today that this is because the atmosphere over the oceans has been unusually stable. And though no one is sure just why, one theory is that it's actually a result of the heat waves. The heat creates rising air over the continents, which translates into sinking air over the oceans -- and that inhibits storm formation.

He also suggests that if this is really what's happening, it means when the Russian heat wave ends, which is expected about 10 days from now, all hell could break loose -- since the energy bottled up in that warm water has to go somewhere, sometime.

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/article.html