NCDC: Record U.S. heat unlikely to be random fluke
"Perhaps a chart can help clarify matters. The National Climatic Data Center has just released its ‘State of the Climate’ report for June 2012. The last 12-month period on the mainland United States, it notes, were the warmest on record. What’s notable, however, is that every single one of the last 13 months were in the top third for their historical distribution–i.e., April 2012 was in the top third for warmest Aprils, etc."
"Climate scientists often use cautious language whenever connecting individual events with global warming. “Humans have made some extreme weather events more likely, and they are happening,” writes Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Penn State. “Just as a back-street gambler might beat someone in an honest game but has a better chance with loaded dice, Nature might have caused this summer’s weather but we gave it a boost.” Scientific efforts to attribute specific, short-term events to long-term climate change have only recently gotten underway.
On the other hand, as Grist’s David Roberts argues, ordinary people rarely talk this way when discussing the causes of most things. No one hedges and says that there are many factors that cause lung cancer and that no one incidence of cancer can be definitively blamed on cigarette smoke (even though this is more scientifically precise). We just say, “smoking causes lung cancer” and leave it at that. Why, Roberts asks, should climate change be any different?"
“This is what global warming is like."
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