Are Recent Extreme Weather Events Caused By Global Warming? NASA Scientist Says Yes
Drought at Lake Constance, Switzerland Kecko/Flickr It's not in doubt that global warming is changing the planet for the worse, but it's difficult to identify which, if any, specific weather events we can definitively link to it. But a new (and divisive) paper from senior NASA climate scientist James E. Hansen suggests that global warming is almost definitely the cause of heat waves and other events observed in the last decade. The paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says events like last year's heat wave in Texas and the 2003 heat wave in Europe were almost certainly caused by systematic climate change. We can say with certainty, says Hansen, that these events wouldn't have happened without the effects of greenhouse gases. The study examined extreme weather events from 1951 to 1980, then compared them with events between 1980 and 2011. They found that...