Thomas Karl : How climate change will be felt by you and impact your neighbors is probably going to be through extreme weather and climate events.
Thomas Karl is director of the U.S National Climatic Data Center, the world’s largest active archive of weather data. Karl was a lead author of a 2008 report that found an increase in extreme weather and climate events happening now in the United States.
Thomas Karl: Extreme events are a manifestation of climate change, and probably one of the more significant aspects of global climate change.
For example, said Dr. Karl, as average temperatures across North America rise, what was once a rare, extreme heat wave becomes more common.
Thomas Karl : We’ve got data going back, in some instances, to the early part of the 20th century. This index looks at extremes of temperature – hot extremes, cold extremes – extremes of precipitation - wet extremes and drought. It looks at one-day very local heavy precipitation events, like flash floods. And it looks at the number of consecutive dry days, a stretch of very dry weather, short-term droughts. It looks at hurricanes, in terms of their frequency and intensity. If we take a look at all those factors and integrate them together, we see a very clear signal of an increase in the number of extremes.
Karl said extreme weather events may sneak up on us…
Thomas Karl : We may be fine for many years, and all of a sudden, one particular season, one particular year, the extremes are far worse than we’ve ever seen before. Unless we’re prepared to adapt, or begin to try and mitigate the amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we’re likely to be put into a situation we won’t be looking forward to.
What Karl said in the last paragraph about climate extremes sneaking up on us is already happening, in some way, I think. Where I live, there was a strange rainy summer three years ago, when all the trees put on extra leaves. That was followed by two years of brutal drought. In my local park, we lost a significant fraction of the trees last summer. Maybe 5%? 10%? They just died. The city quietly chopped them down and ground them up to use as compost. I’m all for landscapes changing over time. I know change is the rule, not the exception. But seeing those trees go really saddened (and scared) me.
The author wants to tie extreme weather and climate change(warming) There have been many super strong huricanes in US history and none have occured within the last couple of years. The Hurricane if 1935 that it blew a locomotiove off its tracks! The winds of Huricane Camille knocked out the wind gauge at Kessler AFB (home of the Huricane Hunters) somewhere at 205 MPH. I lived in Phoenix where it frequently reaches 120 in the summer and I never saw extreme weather while I lived there.
Yeah. I highly doubt that these experts in meteorology were wise enough to consider major storm events of the past. Are you feeling the sarcasm? You might as well have said that since there was snow on the ground in all 49 states that global heating is a crock.
If Thomas Karl was the lead author of a 2008 report that found an increase in extreme weather and climate events happening now in the United States, then I think he needs to get out more.
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and no trend in hurricane activity either
In fact, the climate record shows nothing outside of normal variability.
I gotta give him credit for tenacity. It is pretty obvious now that the AGW gig is up. the data is garbage and we know it.
Change is the only thing that never changes about the earth’s climate. Humans have no effect on our climate. This is all about scaring people into accepting a totalitarian govenrment.
There is NO science that supports any of this.
Keep in mind, all government “science” is about maintaining power and funding. Dogma and the party line are all that matters. Facts are not considered.
this is a good stort
I’m not sure of how current Dr. Karl’s data is but an area of climate research that is starting to shed light on weather regime shifts is a better understanding of the natural cycles. In particular the:
Solar Cycles:
·11 year Schwabe Cycle
·22 year Hale Cycle
·87 year Gleissberg Cycle
·176 year King Hale solar cycle
·210 year Suess Cycle (aka. de Vries Cycle)
·2,300 year Hallstatt cycle
·6,000 year (as of yet unnamed) cycle
Thermohaline Oceanic Cycles:
·65 year Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO)
·80 year Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)
·Variable short timescale El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
·Short timescale North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)
·1,400 year Bond Event Cycles
Milankovitch Orbital Cycles:
·22,000 year procession (wobble)
·41,000 year axial tilt
·110,000 and 400,000 year eccentricity
… to name a few (I may have forgotten one or two).
Presently, the NAO is in a strong negative phase, the PDO is swinging decidedly negative, and the ENSO is in a relatively strong El Nino phase. These have a very strong immediate effect on North Hemisphere weather. In particular, we have colder than normal weather in the NE and SE with greater snow extent, warmer and wetter weather in the Western states and slightly warmer temps in the Alaska and Arctic regions with a warm circulation in parts of Canada. This is all well predicted by historical records.
I’m curious if Dr. Karl adjusts for these cycles (as well as aerosols, recorded changes in atmospheric water vapor, and volcanos)? Can we attribute recent weather extremes to the co-integration of these events or is there solid evidence that the cause is outlying these relatively strong natural cycles?