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The best strategies to keep bodies cool in a heatwave, according to researchers by John Abraham (Climate Consensus-the 97%, Guardian) attracted the highest number of comments of the articles posted on SkS during the past week. Study links heatwave deaths in London and Paris to climate change by Robert McSweeney (Carbon Brief) garnered the second highest number of comments.
Hat tip to I Heart Climate Scientists
And the gist is that when it comes to extreme heat waves in general — heat waves that appear out of the norm in some way, for instance in their intensity, frequency, or duration — while scientists never say individual events are “caused” by climate change, they are getting less and less circumspect about making some connection.
“As predictable as the sunrise, some will say heat waves always happened,” said Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia and former president of the American Meteorological Society. “Yep, so did home runs in baseball, but the steroid era brought more and longer home runs. A new National Academies study suggests that ‘heat waves’ may be one of the primary climate change markers like home runs were in baseball.”
In other words, when a planet warms, the odds shift in favor of more intense or long lasting heat waves. That’s just plain logic.
What science can tell us about the links between global warming and massiveheat waves by Chris Mooney, Energy & Environment, Washington Post, July 21, 2016
Quote derived with permission from author from:
"..the hockey stick is not one of the central lines of evidence for human-caused climate change. It wouldn't matter if there was no hockey stick or any Hockey League. There are now dozens of these sorts of reconstructions and they all come to the same basic conclusion: the recent warming does appear to be unprecedented as far back as we can go. But even if we didn't have that evidence we would still know that humans are warming the planet, changing the climate and that represents a threat if we don't do something about it."
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Posted by John Hartz on Sunday, 24 July, 2016
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