James Hansen, preeminent climatologist, and his distinguished colleagues have just released their latest paper submitted for publication. It will be published but through the prerelease, we are all able to get the latest findings real time. It shows more support and greater elaboration on the damaging effects of climate change. The summary and introduction follow with a link to the full article here and at the end of the summary. Michael Collins
Perceptions of Climate Change: The New Climate Dice
By James Hansen (a1), Makiko Sato (a), Reto Ruedyb (b)
(a) NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University Earth Institute, (b) Sigma Space Partners, New York, NY 10025
“Climate dice”, describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons relative to climatology, have become progressively “loaded” in the past 30 years, coincident with rapid global warming. The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased. An important change is the emergence of a category of summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (σ) warmer than climatology. This hot extreme, which covered much less than 1% of Earth’s surface in the period of climatology, now typically covers about 10% of the land area. We conclude that extreme heat waves, such as that in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010, were “caused” by global warming, because their likelihood was negligible prior to the recent rapid global warming. We discuss practical implications of this substantial, growing climate change
