A new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says they can’t find a link between anthropogenic global warming and weather extremes that occurred in 2013 such as the California drought, Colorado floods, the UK’s exceptionally cold spring, a South Dakota blizzard, Central Europe floods, a northwestern Europe cyclone, and exceptional snowfall in Europe’s Pyrenees Mountains, among other things.
The NOAA report, Explaining Extremes of 2013 from a Climate Perspective, was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. You can download the 100-plus-page report here, but don’t bother. NOAA was apparently reluctant to publish this politically-incorrect document and it is filled with “weasel words.” Here is the basic conclusion in NOAA’s own words:
“This report contributes to the growing body of evidence that human influences on climate have changed the risk of some extreme events and that scientists are increasingly able to detect these changes. A failure to find anthropogenic signals for several events examined in this report does not prove anthropogenic climate change had no role to play. Rather, an anthropogenic contribution to these events that is distinguishable from natural climate variability could not be detected by these analyses. Thus, there may have been an anthropogenic role, but these particular analyses did not find one. This year, the number of events analyzed in this report has again increased, and the range of event types analyzed has expanded to include a blizzard, snowfall, and a mid-latitude cyclone.”
This finding, by the way, is consistent with one by the IPCC two years ago: “While there is evidence that increases in greenhouse gases have likely caused changes in some types of extremes, there is no simple answer to the question of whether the climate, in general, has become more or less extreme.”
In the abstract of the NOAA paper we find this statement: “The findings indicate that human-caused climate change greatly increased the risk for the extreme heat waves.” That’s what most of the alarmist press ran with. Those NOAA findings are based entirely on computer simulations rather than on hard data. Here is what the real data looks like:
Observational data does not appear to show any trend in the occurrence of heat waves, whatever the cause, and thus provides no physical evidence that global warming is producing weather extremes.
See also:
Failure of climate models shows that carbon dioxide does not drive global temperature