[Ludi]

Warming to Cause Harsher Weather, Study Says

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 18, 2005; Page A02

Extreme weather events -- including heat waves, floods and drought -- are likely to become more common over the next century in the United States because of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study by Purdue University researchers.

The analysis, which is being published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, examines how heat-trapping gases linked to climate change may intensify precipitation, drought and other weather conditions. Instances of extreme heat will probably increase throughout the country, the scientists concluded, and many areas will experience heavier downpours even if rain becomes less frequent.

"I would be thrilled to be wrong," said Noah S. Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at the Purdue Climate Change Research Center and the university's department of earth and atmospheric sciences. "It's definitely going to be more extreme hot temperatures."

The four-person research team, which included two scientists from the Earth Systems Physics Group at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, compared U.S. weather patterns from 1961 to 1985 with models of future weather patterns from 2071 to 2095.

...

Catastrophic weather events have taken an increasingly heavy financial toll on American homeowners and businesses in recent years. Over the past three decades, the country has experienced a 15-fold increase in insured losses from extreme weather events, according to a report issued last month by Ceres, a coalition of investors that lobbies businesses to be environmentally responsible. Increased development in flood-prone areas has contributed to those losses.

"We're in an era of escalating climate change impacts on governments and the public that can cause substantial financial risks," said Ceres President Mindy S. Lubber. "The government needs to step in and act, and call for policy changes that will reduce the risks."

[medicvet]

I expect more and more records to start being broken.

[Sencha]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '"')The government needs to step in and act, and call for policy changes that will reduce the risks."

[GrizzAdams]

I also keep finding repeated reports from scientists in Siberia saying that the permafrost is melting. This may not seem like much, but there are a lot of frozen bogs in Siberia and now they are melting, and if these bogs come online, they will produce an extraordinary amount of methane into the atmosphere. While methane being a very potent green house gas.

Climate Warning as Siberia Melts