It’s almost a game. An unusual weather event happens and the GWHs leap to the conclusion that this is EXACTLY WHAT WE PREDICTED from global warming! Think, Katrina. Think the recent arctic weather. Think the Russian heatwave of 2010.
And yet, it usually turns out not to be true. This happened regarding the Russian heat wave of 2010. Here’s what some of the “experts” said at the time:
As Russia chokes from a heat wave of unprecedented ferocity, president Dmitry Medvedev has strengthened his call for the world’s leaders to take action to fight global warming pollution. The scientific community has warned for decades that burning coal and oil without limit would intensify heat waves, droughts, and floods. Now that the planet is at its hottest in recorded history, freak climate disasters are arriving with increasing frequency. Some scientists are now stating the obvious: Russia’s heat wave simply would not have happened without the influence of fossil fuel pollution on our atmosphere. University of Texas climate scientist Michael Tobis is “hazarding a guess” that “the Russian heat wave of 2010 is the first disaster unequivocally attributable to anthropogenic climate change.”...
Meteorologist Rob Carver, the Research and Development Scientist for Weather Underground, agrees. Using a statistical analysis of historical temperature records, Dr. Carver estimates that the likelihood of Moscow’s 100-degree record on July 29 is on the order of once per thousand years, or even less than once every 15,000 years — in other words, a vanishingly small probability. However, those tiny odds are based on the assumption that the long-term climate is stable, an assumption that is no longer true.
Like Dr. Tobis, Carver believes that manmade global warming has fundamentally altered weather patterns to produce the killer Russian heat wave. “Without contributions from anthropogenic climate change,” Carver said in an email interview with the Wonk Room, “I don’t think this event would have reached such extremes or even happened at all.”
Wrong. From the story:
Global warming isn’t directly to blame for last summer’s deadly — and extraordinary — heat wave in Russia, researchers said in a report Wednesday that came with a climate warning. “We may be on the cusp of a period in which the probability of such events increases rapidly, due primarily to the influence of projected increases in greenhouse gas concentrations,” said the team led by Randall Dole and Martin Hoerling of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
It was the warmest July since at least 1880 in western Russia. The heat wave led to an increase in deaths in the region, as well as drought, widespread fires, increased air pollution and severe crop damage. Also affected by the warming were Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic nations. The extreme heat raised questions about links to global warming — the rising temperatures worldwide that most atmospheric scientists attribute to greenhouse gases being pumped into the air by industrial and other processes over the last century or so. The intense heat wave in Russia “was mainly due to natural internal atmospheric variability,” the scientists reported in a paper to be published in Geophysical Research Letters...
I keep telling the hysterics why their credibility continues to sink. But they just won’t listen.
