FIRE AND FLOOD, 2

Long, hot summer of fire, floods fits predictions
Charles J. Hanley (w/Michael J. Crumb and Christopher Bodeen), August 13, 2010 (AP via Washington Post)

"…From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Iowa and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It's not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.

"The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says - although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming."

Heat bent these steel railroad tracks last summer in Australia. This year is hotter. (click to enlarge)

"The experts now see an urgent need for better ways to forecast extreme events like Russia's heat wave and wildfires and the record deluge devastating Pakistan…The U.N.'s network of climate scientists - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - has long predicted that rising global temperatures would produce more frequent and intense heat waves, and more intense rainfalls…Still, climatologists generally refrain from blaming warming for this drought or that flood, since so many other factors also affect the day's weather.

"The WMO pointed out that this summer's events fit the international scientists' projections of 'more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming.' …The melting of land ice into the oceans is causing about 60 percent of the accelerating rise in sea levels worldwide, with thermal expansion from warming waters causing the rest. The WMO'S World Climate Research Program says seas are rising by 1.34 inches (34 millimeters) per decade, about twice the 20th century's average."

click to enlarge

"Worldwide temperature readings, meanwhile, show that this January-June was the hottest first half of a year since recordkeeping began in the mid-19th century. Meteorologists say 17 nations have recorded all-time-high temperatures in 2010, more than in any other year.

"Scientists blame the warming on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases pouring into the atmosphere from power plants, cars and trucks, furnaces and other fossil fuel-burning industrial and residential sources…Experts are growing ever more vocal in urging sharp cutbacks in emissions, to protect the climate that has nurtured modern civilization."