British and American climate agencies, drawing on work from around the world, have produced the second in what is planned as an annual roundup of studies seeking to characterize the contribution of human-driven global warming to rare and consequential weather and coastal events. The package, "Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 from a Climate Perspective," was published yesterday in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. (You can listen to a discussion of the findings between authors and reporters here.)
As might be expected, the conclusions about extreme weather in 2012 mirror general understanding of where the strongest influence from greenhouse-gas heating is likely to be manifested: in extreme heat and, in some cases, heavy rain. The firm link between rising seas and the rising risk of destructive coastal flooding was also reflected in an analysis of the changed odds of Sandy-style inundations. Much there depends on the pace of sea-level rise, which remains highly uncertain.
Ken Chang's news article in The Times captures the main points and includes an apt analogy used in the introduction to the studies:
The articles' editors likened climate change to someone habitually driving a bit over the speed limit. Even if the speeding itself is unlikely to directly cause an accident, it increases the likelihood that something else — a wet road or a distracting text message — will do so and that the accident, when it occurs, will be more calamitous.
One shift from the 2011 analysis is the inclusion in several cases of more than one analysis of the same extreme event. These comparisons helpfully conveys the early stage of understanding of how a global shift, like the buildup of heat-trapping gases and heat in oceans, plays out in particular regions or types of weather. For anyone wanting more detail on efforts to clarify such questions, a superb resource is the batch of presentations given at a 2010 Paris workshop on research methods in assessing extreme events. Another, of course, is the 2012 report on managing risks from extreme weather events from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The editors of the new paper collection stressed that the meteorological events were chosen subjectively. You'll note, for example, a heavy focus on developed countries, with one study of East African drought and one more of flooding rains in China (neither of which found a strong global warming signal) being the exceptions.
Also, it would have been interesting to see a study of a rare drop in extreme weather — the tornado drought of 2012 in the United States (which has continued in 2013) — in the context of climate change.
For more on one of the most robust findings in the collection — the raised likelihood of events like the widespread heat wave in the United States in July 2012, watch this video chat led by an author of that study, Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford University:
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