Welcome to the age of extremes—Recent weather disasters are consistent with a warming planet…

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http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/welcome-to-the-age-of-extremes-1832082.html

Welcome to the age of extremes

Recent weather disasters are consistent with a warming planet, says Steve Connor. Could the trouble have started already?

Wednesday, 2 December 2009

The difference between climate and weather is one of scale. Climate is what happens over decades, centuries and millennia, whereas weather occurs on the human timescale of hours, days and weeks. Climate is what you expect, and weather is what we get, and this is the rub when attributing any single extreme event, such as a flooding or a drought, to global warming.

As events in Cumbria have shown, with its record 24-hour rainfall, the weather is full of surprises. This is because it is essentially a chaotic phenomenon with a wide, natural variability. It is not for nothing that the science of chaos theory is so often illustrated by the apocryphal story of a butterfly in Brazil causing a hurricane in Florida. Small perturbations in one part of the global climate system can have far-reaching consequences for weather patterns in other parts of the world. As more energy in the form of heat enters the system, climate models run on computers suggest there will be more weather extremes.

The signs of climate change are all around us, such as the melting of mountain glaciers and Arctic sea ice. But the question is whether it has already begun to trigger the extreme weather events predicted. A growing body of expertise suggests that it has.

"The evidence is growing that damaging climate and weather events – potentially intensified by global warming – are already happening and beginning to affect society and ecosystems," says a recent joint statement by the Royal Society, the Met Office and the Natural Environment Research Council.

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