And the gist is that when it comes to extreme heat waves in general — heat waves that appear out of the norm in some way, for instance in their intensity, frequency, or duration — while scientists never say individual events are “caused” by climate change, they are getting less and less circumspect about making some connection.
“As predictable as the sunrise, some will say heat waves always happened,” said Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia and former president of the American Meteorological Society. “Yep, so did home runs in baseball, but the steroid era brought more and longer home runs. A new National Academies study suggests that ‘heat waves’ may be one of the primary climate change markers like home runs were in baseball.”
In other words, when a planet warms, the odds shift in favor of more intense or long lasting heat waves. That’s just plain logic.
What science can tell us about the links between global warming and massiveheat waves by Chris Mooney, Energy & Environment, Washington Post, July 21, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment