Thursday, January 31, 2013

New Research Finds that Most Monthly Heat Records Today are Due to Global Warming

http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1835

Posted on 30 January 2013 by dana1981


New Research Finds that Most Monthly Heat Records Today are Due to Global Warming
Posted on 30 January 2013 by dana1981

A new paper published in Climatic Change by Coumou, Robinson, and Rahmstorf (CRR13) examines the increased frequency of record-breaking monthly temperature records over the past 130 years, finding that these records are now five times more likely to occur due to global warming, with much more to come.

"...worldwide, the number of local record-breaking monthly temperature extremes is now on average five times larger than expected in a climate with no long-term warming. This implies that on average there is an 80% chance that a new monthly heat record is due to climatic change ... Under a medium global warming scenario, by the 2040s we predict the number of monthly heat records globally to be more than 12 times as high as in a climate with no long-term warming."

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As lead author Coumou noted, this is even worse than it sounds, because breaking a heat record in 2040 will require much higher temperatures than breaking a record today.

"Now this doesn’t mean there will be 12 times more hot summers in Europe than today – it actually is worse. To count as new records, they actually have to beat heat records set in the 2020s and 2030s, which will already be hotter than anything we have experienced to date. And this is just the global average – in some continental regions, the increase in new records will be even greater."

The results of this research are consistent with those of Hansen et al. (2012), which found that global warming is shifting the temperature distribution to make extreme heat waves more likely to occur, similar to the findings of several other studies such as Donat and Alexander (2012) and Meehl et al. (2009).

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This would of course be bad news. For example, as shown by Hawkins et al. (2012), crops tend not to respond well to extreme heat, so these findings could pose a significant problem for global food production, as well as increasing heat fatalities, requiring costly adaptive measures to prepare people for more frequent extreme heat waves. In January of 2013, Australia has been trying to cope with this sort of extreme heat, which has resulted in devastating wildfires and other nasty consequences.

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