| It's not just your imagination. The punishing heat waves, record snowfall, and 500-year floods, which seem to be occurring with increasing frequency, are doing just that, thanks to global warming. According to a study (pdf) published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, these extreme weather events are clearly attributed to human-induced climate change and will only worsen as average temperatures tick higher and higher. According to report authors Dr. Erich Markus Fischer and Reto Knutti, both with the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, under present-day warming of 0.85 degrees Celsius, the likelihood of a "moderate hot extreme" occurring is 75 percent greater than in pre-industrial times. However, because warming increases non-linearly, under the projected warming of 2 degrees Celsius--widely considered the threshold for the worst effects of climate change--the probability of a "hot extreme" is more than five times greater than current levels. |
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