
Meteorologists are seeing global warming's effect on the weather - okket
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/may/27/meteorologists-are-seeing-global-warmings-effect-on-the-weather
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PeterWhittaker
This is something I've long wondered about. It's always been to me that global
warming and climate change will lead to more extreme weather: Pump more energy
into a system (global warming in a nutshell: more energy retained in the
system) and the behaviour of that system will be more extreme even as average
and median behaviour edges along.

I honestly don't understand why so many people fail to grasp this simple
notion. I write this simply from this perspective of naivety: Why is this
point rejected or not grasped by so many?

FWIW, thanks.

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todd8
I am not a climate scientist, but I believe that the connection is a bit more
subtle. As I understand it the global circulation models predict that average
temperatures will rise but in particular that temperatures at latitudes
further from the equator will rise more than those closer to the equator. In
other words the temperature differences across the planet will diminish and
thus provide less available thermodynamic free energy available to drive
weather. This would suggest that extreme weather would decrease.

Naturally, things in the real world are much more complex. The oceans are a
huge thermal mass and will have temperatures changes that lag the atmospheric
changes. Will the atmospheric to ocean temperature differences increase with
global warming? I don't know but it sounds plausible. That would mean more
energy to drive hurricanes. Yet, there doesn't currently seem to be any
increase in the frequency of large hurricanes, see [1] for example amongst
many references.

I recall incidents of extreme weather from my childhood (over half a century
ago) and don't notice any increase in them today, but I simply don't trust
myself to be a good judge of the significance of personal experiences and what
that says about weather across the globe. (Here in the US, I remember walking
to school at -13 F; a few years later I visited my girlfriend's family in
Texas and it was more than 125 degrees hotter that that day I walked to school
in Detroit. Pretty extreme difference before global warming would have had an
effect on weather. If I was younger it might have been easy to attribute this
to global warming, but these were cases from over 50 years ago.) I wish I
understood climate as well as I understand computer science.

[1] [http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-
hurricanes](http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes).

