Global Warming Is a Cause of This Year's Extreme Weather. Commentary by Sharon Begley, Newsweek, July 7-14 issue. "It's almost a point of pride with climatologists. Whenever someplace is hit with a heat wave, drought, killer storm or other extreme weather, scientists trip over themselves to absolve global warming. No particular weather event, goes the mantra, can be blamed on something so general. Extreme weather occurred before humans began loading up the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. So this storm or that heat wave could be the result of the same natural forces that prevailed 100 years ago -- random movements of air masses, unlucky confluences of high- and low-pressure systems -- rather than global warming... This pretense has worn thin. The frequency of downpours and heat waves, as well as the power of hurricanes, has increased so dramatically that '100-year storms' are striking some areas once every 15 years, and other once rare events keep returning like a bad penny. As a result, some climatologists now say global warming is to blame. Rising temperatures boost the probability of extreme weather, says Tom Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center and lead author of a new report [PDF, 180 pp] from the Bush administration's Climate Change Science Program." [See Report Predicts Severe Weather Increases As Earth Warms. By Juliet Eilperin, WashPost, June 20, 2008.]
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