Droughts Linked To Global Warming

Layzej writes "Two new papers indicate that we are likely already seeing some of the predicted impacts of global warming. The first used Monte Carlo simulations to analyze how many new record events you expect to see in a time series with a trend. They applied the technique to the unprecedented Russian heat wave of July 2010, which killed 700 people and contributed to soaring wheat prices. According to the analysis, there's an 80 percent chance that climate change was responsible. The authors have described their methods and how they improved on previous studies. The second group studied wintertime droughts in the Mediterranean region. They found that 'the magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone. This is not encouraging news for a region that already experiences water stress, because it implies natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region's climate to normal.'"

Comments

Re:It's called "climate change" NOT "global warmin

[Brett Buck]

Most people call it "global redistribution scam", but potato, potahto.

Re:We're not there yet...

[Solandri]

You're hoping for too much from deniers. Their selective memory will take care of the issue and they won't admit to being wrong anyway.

You mean selective memory about things like this? So global warming causes there to be more water vapor in the air, which causes more rainfall and snow. But at the same time it causes more droughts?

I happen to believe the planet is warming, but the problem is that a lot of its proponents throw proper skepticism out the window in their zeal to turn anything which happens into evidence in support of it. It's no wonder a lot of people are in denial. A scientific theory has to be disprovable, and when those advocating a theory say things which remove disprovability by saying contradictory evidence supports the theory, of course people are going to be instinctively skeptical.

(And as for explaining the apparent contradiction between more droughts and more snowfall, higher temperatures means more energy in the system, and a more energetic system has more extreme highs and lows. Some local regions get unusually high precipitation, others get unusually low. But I'll bet most global warming proponents never thought of that. They just accepted it without question when told that more rainfall was due to global warming. And accepted it without question when told that more drought was due to global warming.)