U.S. Heat Waves of 2011 Linked Directly to Man-Made Climate Change

By on August 8, 2012 in News 15

New-York-City---Times-Square---Naked-Cowboy---1---(Gentry)Lauren Morello and ClimateWire report that new analysis shows there is “virtually no explanation other than climate change” for extreme heat events including last year’s scorching weather in Texas and Oklahoma, via Scientific American:

Yes, it really is that hot.

Extreme summer heat — like the sizzling temperatures that hit Texas and Oklahoma last year and Moscow in 2010 — occurs far more frequently now than it did 30 years ago, according to a new study from NASA climatologist James Hansen.

Between 1951 and 1980, just 0.2 percent of Earth’s land areas experienced that kind of scorching summer, on average. Today, that number has soared to 10 percent, according to Hansen’s statistical analysis of global temperature data. And the likely cause is man-made climate change.

“We can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small,” Hansen and his co-authors wrote in a study that will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientist put it more bluntly in an op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post: “The future is now. And it is hot.”…

[continues at Scientific American]

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  • http://buzzcoastin.posterous.com BuzzCoastin

    we better spend a lot of government money
    through university research to see what we can do
    to stop and reverse the last 500 years of ecological chaos 
    before they run out of funding
    or hot air

  • paprtowl

    still nothing said about the largest contributor to rapid climate change, deforestation in south america.

  • Nephilim

    I for one have never argued that global warming – now climate change – is at least in part man made.  However, I cannot believe that it is due to cow farts and humans breathing when I have seen pipes spewing waste into the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.  The corporatocracy is responsible and are trying to shift the blame. 

    Though it is true that cows do not produce much gas unless they are fed corn, as in the feed lots that are producing unhealthy beef, the truth is that cows are not supposed to be eating corn.  They wouldn’t eat it if humans did not feed it to them, and if humans did not feed it to them, make fuels and High Fructose Corn Syrup with it, we would not be talking about any shortages of corn today.

    Impact from coal burning power plants, Hydo-frakking, and the refusal to allow alternative means of power to see the light of day (just to name a few) are much more serious than the CO2 that each of us expels.

  • Marklar_Prime

    Nice photo of a climate shaman.

  • Jackedu317

    i’m sure the sun has absolutely nothing to do with climate change… right? you know… that big nuclear furnace in the sky couldn’t possibly make the earth warmer…

    • platypussy

      BAHAHA don’t be ridiculous. I mean sure, it might look that way especially when you consider the much warmer temperatures of the past, but it was really the cavemen and their damn SUVs. It is simply preposterous to believe any of those scientific “theories” which state that very small changes in solar activity can greatly affect temperature on Earth and can be measured. Also, PAY NO ATTENTION to the increased solar activity within the past decade or so at least, which is, strangely (but only coincidentally), about when this whole anthropogenic climate-change fever started.

      I am greatly in favor of treating the planet with more respect, reducing and perhaps even eliminating waste (if possible), not destroying the rainforests, etc. But, the path which we seem to be going down is going to be much more harmful than beneficial. Fear can be a great motivator and may sometimes be necessary, but it is really being taken advantage of in this case. I’d rather not have to pay taxes on how much I breathe.

      • platypussy

        “But, the path which we seem to be going down is going to be much more harmful than beneficial.” To clarify, I mean the path of highly-regulating CO2 and creating many new taxes, among other things.

        • Andrew

          Taxes aren’t really harmful.  Money isn’t objective wealth.

      • Andrew

        The sun has been in a cooling trend for the last few decades.

        • Jin The Ninja

          i believe you (and quite enjoy the implication regardless), but i didn’t know that. my non-asian, non-scientific teeth are showing, as it were.

    • Marklar_Prime

      It’s much more complex than the Sun Vs. CO2 actually. The solar system is not just a collection of billiard balls orbiting each other inside of a vacuum where the center most ball just happens to be on fire. The Earth’s climate exists within a solar climate which includes not only heat emanated from the sun but also solar winds, complex magnetic interactions and electrical flows, then there’s cosmic rays and cloud cover (water vapor being the greenhouse gas with the highest heat coefficient). The solar climate is in turn part of a galactic climate.

      But if it’s possible for drinking and diving to cause a traffic accident then all traffic accidents MUST be caused by drinking and driving don’t you know.

  • Dueyv9

    So whats the direct link? Is it something I can click on?

    • Marklar_Prime

       The direct link to an article on disinfo.com is always the link to the source  – in this case the link to Scientific American in the first paragraph of the article.

  • Thedukeoftheusa

    So Wait let’s depopulate 90% of the earth so only the elite live in peace.

    • Andrew

      Won’t work.  The top 10% cause most of the pollution.