In the last set of articles we’ve looked at past trends in extreme weather, following the flow of chapter 11 from the 6th assessment report of the IPCC. How do we know the cause of any changes? In recent years in most of the media everything that changes is “climate change” which is implicitly or explicitly equated with burning fossil fuels, i.e., adding CO2 into the atmosphere. It’s a genius catchphrase from a marketing point of view, not so helpful for scientific understanding.
Many times news articles or comments on news articles of floods and other extreme weather events point out anecdotally that extreme weather events are breaking all kinds of records and are usually attributed to anthropogenic causes. There is no understanding of how many thousands of towns, cities, regions, states, etc. that have kept weather records over centuries and so one would expect some kind of weather record would likely be broken somewhere in the country almost every day.
Natural Variability, Attribution and Climate Models #1
Many times news articles or comments on news articles of floods and other extreme weather events point out anecdotally that extreme weather events are breaking all kinds of records and are usually attributed to anthropogenic causes. There is no understanding of how many thousands of towns, cities, regions, states, etc. that have kept weather records over centuries and so one would expect some kind of weather record would likely be broken somewhere in the country almost every day.