Experts: Severe weather events to multiply

By Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published June 19, 2008 at 1:59 p.m.
Updated June 19, 2008 at 1:59 p.m.

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Severe weather events such as the flooding in the Midwest likely will happen four times more often by the end of the century, a panel of climate scientists said today.

Such severe events happen maybe once in 20 years in the United States, said senior scientists with the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. In another 90 years, they'll happen once every five years.

Water vapor accumulating in the air will increase the number of severe downpours, while warmer sea surface temperatures will ramp up the severity of hurricanes.

Meanwhile, Colorado and the southwestern United States likely will see more frequent droughts.

"When it rains, it will rain harder, but when it's not raining the temperatures will be warmer, and more water will evaporate," Tom Karl, director of the National Climate Data Center, said from Asheville, N.C., via teleconference. "Droughts can become more intense and will last longer."

The Government Climate Panel's report of climate change's influence on extreme weather was cobbled together by examining hundreds of reports on actual weather changes and on computer models of future changes.

Jerry Meehl, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, and co-author of the new report, said "We've seen more extreme weather in the last 20 to 30 years.

"And we're projecting that to continue and to get more severe.

"There will be fewer nights when the temperature goes below freezing. We'll see more extreme heat events, more warm spells."

It is very likely that humans are affecting the changes because of the proliferation of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide from oil and coal, in the atmosphere, the scientists said.

There is no question that there is more water vapor in the air now, and it is a certainty that more water vapor produces more intense downpours, the authors said.

And it is certain that there have been more severe weather events in North America the past quarter century than there were during most of the past century, they said.

The future is less certain, they acknowledged. It's virtually impossible to connect a single storm event to human-caused global warming.

Still, the scientists said, events such as the Midwest floods fit perfectly into the pattern predicted by the global-warming models.

• June 19, 2008

  3:16 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  SockRayBlue writes:

  By the end of the century.........Talk about a long shot! Who's going to be alive to remember those words? Go away.

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