This summer is what seems to global warming
WASHINGTON (AP) - It 's just weird time or something more? Climate scientists suggest that if you want a taste of some of the worst of global warming, check out the weather in the United States in recent weeks.
Horrendous fires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating drought. Flooding from giant floods. And a powerful wind storm derecho called strange.
These are the kinds of extremes experts have predicted will come with climate change, although it is too early to say which is the cause. Nor say that global warming is the reason were set to 3215 at daily high temperature in the month of June.
Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change requires intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and a lot of time. Sometimes it is not caused by global warming. The weather is always variable, bizarre things happen.
And this time it was local. Europe, Asia and Africa are not having similar disasters now, even if they have had their extreme events in recent years.
But, at least since 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would lead, in general, more heatwaves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, storms, fires and more widespread deterioration. In the U.S., these two extremes are happening here and now.
So far this year, over 2.1 million acres have burned in fires, over 113 million people in the United States were under advisory in areas of extreme heat last Friday, two thirds of the country are affected by drought, and early June, floods flooded Minnesota and Florida.
"This is what global warming looks at the regional or personal," said Jonathan Overpeck, a professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. "The additional heat increases the likelihood of heat waves, worse, droughts, storms and fires. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have warned."
Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado fire charred, said that these are conditions much to record that he said would happen, but most people would not listen. So I told you-know-you time, she said.
Recently, in March, a special report a extreme events and disasters by Nobel laureate Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned of "unprecedented weather and climate extremes." Its author, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University, said Monday, "It 's really as dramatic as many of the models that we have talked about as an expression of extreme are hitting the U.S. at this time."
"What we're seeing is actually a window into what global warming looks really," said Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer. "It seems the heat. It appears fire. It seems that this type of environmental disasters."
Oppenheimer said on Thursday. This was before the East Coast was hit with three-digit temperatures and before a derecho - a large, powerful and long-lasting straight line wind storm - blew in from Chicago to Washington. The storm and its aftermath have killed over 20 people and left millions without electricity. The experts say that has had the readings of energy five times higher than that of normal time.
Powered by heat records, this was among the strongest of this type of storm in the region in recent history, said meteorologist Harold Brooks Research of the National Laboratory violent storm in Norman, Oklahoma, the scientists expect "non-tornadic events such as the wind "and the other one this time to increase with climate change due to heat and instability, he said.
These models not only have happened in the last week or two. Spring and winter in the United States was the warmest on record and among the least snowy, setting the stage for the harsh weather to come, scientists say.
From 1 January, the U.S. has established more than 40,000 records of the warm temperatures, but less than 6000 record low temperatures, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For most of the last century, the U.S. used to record the hot and cold evenly, but in the first decade of this century in America set two records for each hot cold, said Jerry Meehl, a climate expert extreme at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. This year the ratio is about 7 to 1 to hot to cold. Some computer models say that the relationship has hit 20-to-1 by mid-century, Meehl said.
"In future we expect larger, more intense heat waves and we have seen in recent summers," NOAA Climate Monitoring Chief Derek Arndt said.
The 100-degree heat, drought, melting of snow early and beetles awakening from hibernation early to strip the trees that are combined to prepare the ground for the present distribution of unusual fires in the West, said that the University of Montana ecosystems Professor Steven Running, a fire expert.
While at least 15 climate scientists told The Associated Press that this long hot summer of the United States is consistent with what is expected in global warming, history is full of these ends, said John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. It 'a global warming skeptics that says: "The culprit, in my opinion is Mother Nature."
But the vast majority of mainstream climate scientists, as Meehl, do not agree: "This is what global warming is like, and we'll see more of this as we go into the future."
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on extreme weather conditions: http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/
U.S. record time:
Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbear
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