Weird weather: a sign of global warming?
November 4th, 2010, 4:23 pm · posted by Pat Brennan, O.C. Register science, environment editor
More lightning and thunder in a single day than we typically see in a year. Drenching rain in what was supposed to be a dry fall. An oddly cool summer, then record heat in November.Is Orange County's wild weather somehow linked to planetary warming? Or is asking such a question falling prey to a very human tendency: magnifying local conditions to global proportions?
Climate experts say it's mostly a case of the latter.
No single weather event can be linked directly to global warming — a statistical measure of changes over decades.
In other words, it's risky to draw conclusions about long-term climate patterns from a few weeks of weird weather.
"The simple answer is that this is weather," said Bill Patzert, a climatologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "So don't confuse it too much with global warming."
Fall in coastal Southern California also is typically a time of transition; it's not unusual to have rain and cool weather one week, heat and wind the next.
And we can get a distorted picture by focusing on too small a slice of space as well as time.
Hotter summers and more drought do seem to be long-term trends in Southern California, Patzert said.
<SNIP>View entire article here: http://sciencedude.ocregister.com/2010/11/04/weird-weather-a-sign-of-global-warming/114210/
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