I think this is a pretty balanced article about what the media can appropriately say about recent floods in the States and climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK Met Office says that even if CO2 dropped after its rise, rainfall changes caused by AGW would hang around for decades. Seems pretty academic to me: why bother looking at unrealistic theoretical drops in CO2? Anyway, their modelling for what rainfall changes AGW will cause indicates:
Last night's Catalyst had an interesting story on Western Australia being unusually dry for the last 30 years. They don't say it's all CO2's fault; changes to the ozone layer get much blame too.High latitude countries such as Canada and Russia would receive more rain and snow, whereas other regions such as the Amazon basin, Australia and parts of sub-Saharan Africa would receive substantially less.
As the oceans have huge capacity to store heat, releasing the heat relating to a temporary quadrupling of the man-made greenhouse effect would take many decades.
The Met Office computer model is known to project more drying of the Amazon than most others.
All a bit of a worry.
From the article: "The science has become clearer, although by no means certain, that local precipitation extremes may be connected to climate change. Yet, to date, the mainstream media has shied away from raising climate change in extreme event coverage."
ReplyDeleteItalics are mine.
I think the problem is that too many people are used to dealing in certainties rather than possibilities. For some people, the idea that extreme events could possibly be the result of climate change means that every recent disaster on Earth was caused by human industry. This, in turns, leads others to see people who believe that climate change is occuring as fanatical activists.
At the same time, that second group interprets the word "may" to mean "isn't definitely happening, so therefore is not happening".