This years weather was truly weird. Hot cold hot cold hot cold. Next year will be even more uneven. I wonder when the farmers are going to wake up to the fact that their livelihoods are on the line. Nitrogen fertilizer is one of the chief causes. Yet next spring they will be spraying it with gay abandon.
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate-weather/blogs/un-wilder-weather-on-the-way#
U.N.: Wilder weather on the way
The threat of heat waves and heavy precipitation are becoming especially severe, warns the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
U.N.: Wilder weather on the way
The threat of heat waves and heavy precipitation are becoming especially severe, warns the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
People around the planet should prepare for “unprecedented extreme weather,” according to a report released Friday by top international scientists and disaster experts. Earth’s recent wild weather is likely just a sneak peek, the report warns, as rising global temperatures cook the oceans and atmosphere into a frenzy.
“We need to be worried,” one of the study’s lead authors tells the Associated Press. “And our response needs to anticipate disasters and reduce risk before they happen rather than wait until after they happen and clean up afterward. … Risk has already increased dramatically.”
This dire outlook comes via the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a Nobel Prize-winning research group that issues periodic reports on global warming. The IPCC’s next big report is due in 2014, but a panel meeting in Uganda this week decided the threat of extreme weather warrants a warning now. If greenhouse gas emissions keep rising, the IPCC says temperatures — and weather — could quickly spiral out of control.
“For the high-emissions scenario, it is likely that the frequency of hot days will increase by a factor of 10 in most regions of the world,” says the IPCC’s Thomas Stocker. “Likewise, heavy precipitation will occur more often, and the wind speed of tropical cyclones will increase while their number will likely remain constant or decrease.”
Scientists avoid blaming specific storms on climate trends, but the broader link between weather and warming has been discussed for years — especially after the horrific 2005 hurricane season. It has become an increasingly common topic of debate over the last two years, as blizzards battered North America and Europe, wildfire and droughts ravaged Russia and Somalia, floods inundated Pakistan and Thailand, and tornadoes leveled U.S. cities from Missouri to Massachusetts.
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Go there and see the neat graphs and the rest of the story. More tomorrow.
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