Drought in California. Floods in Colorado

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Drought in California. Floods in Colorado. Doubt, Now, in Scientists' Minds

By Eric Roston 2 hours ago

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By now, smart shoppers know that "natural" flavors and "artificial" flavors overlap in ways that challenge the meaning of the word natural.

Something similar is happening to the weather. Every year, scientists dissect extreme events for their natural causes and any trace of manmade global warming. A new report put out jointly by American and British scientists tours some of the most extreme weather of 2013, and finds climate change lurking behind some of them. Asian heat and storms had a boost from global warming. If California's drought, Colorado's flooding and the U.K.'s extreme cold also did, scientists haven't found it yet.

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Explaining Extreme Events of 2013 From a Climate Perspective directly confronts the most frustrating problem in current research: Scientists understand climate change pretty well; what's challenging is how the natural climate oscillates to begin with and how it varies year by year, decade by decade.
Scientists are getting better at it. There's "strong evidence" that some extremes, such as hot days and big storms, have increased since 1950, the authors write. But "many challenges still need to be overcome to authoritatively address" how climate change affects individual events.
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The evidence is clearer-cut in some cases. Human influence contributed to bizarre heat in Australia and in the western tropical Pacific last year, according to the report. Temperatures hit levels that "were either completely outside of, or extremely rare in" the region's climate century-long history. Five separate studies of the suffocating Australian heat wave reinforce a human role behind it.
Mankind's fingerprint on extreme events in North America were more elusive. The seemingly unprecedented Colorado flooding that occurred in September 2013 turned out to be precedented, in a 1938 deluge that had similar scale and duration. Climate change, the authors concluded, may actually reduce the likelihood of such events in that area.
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California saw less rain and snow in 2013 than it had in the state's 119-year record. January and February 2013 brought 28 percent and 15 percent of normal monthly rainfall. The drought has continued in 2014 (beyond the scope of the report) as communities and industry face high heat and low water levels. All California counties have been designated as federal disaster areas -- but a specific tie to manmade warming remains elusive. There may be an indirect tie, the scientists report tentatively.

Scientists poring over data and computer models can "authoritatively" make the call only in some instances, leaving the public with questions just as confounding as they are in processed foods: Some things are clearly natural, some things are clearly manmade, but otherwise it's almost always impossible for mortals to tell the difference.

More by Eric Roston ( @eroston on Twitter):

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• Apple CEO Cook: And one more thing ... climate change is a really big deal
• The iPhone 6 makes climate change simple
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Drought in California. Floods in Colorado. Doubt, Now, in Scientists' Minds

Bloomberg‎ - 3 hours ago

By now, smart shoppers know that “natural” flavors and "artificial" flavors overlap in ways that ...Drought in California. Floods in Colorado. Doubt, Now, in Scientists' Minds

Yahoo Finance‎ - 2 hours ago

 

But then of course, there is weather warfare which larger countries have been secretly developing since the

1960s and 1970s which is one way they fight each other and compete globally and kill each other. They just

don't talk about it much since it was first developed in the 1960s and 1970s. I guess it's sort of like

countries stealing trillions of dollars of each other countries people's over the Internet. It isn't something

countries talk about much.