Climatic Events Overview & Information

Overview

Climate events might include short term weather events like hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, tropical storms, snow storms, rains, floods, freezes, and heat waves if one considers the number and intensity of the events. Longer term climate events such as droughts are seasonal or lasting several years and can be triggered by volcanoes, meteor impacts, solar activity, melting ice caps and sheets, and changes in ocean currents that induce El Niño and La Niña like events. While the earth always has had major climate events, some scientists, after the 2005 hurricane season, looked for a correlation between the number and intensity of hurricanes and the longer term climate change associated with global warming.

Much of the recent attention has focused on the effects of El Niños and La Niñas on weather patterns and events in the USA and other parts of the world. However, attempts to tie El Niños and La Niñas to global warming are complicated and have less credence. Refer to the issues under Oceans for more discussion of ocean temperature anomalies on weather.

NOAA National Climatic Data Center 2007 Report

Supporting Viewpoints

Those with supporting viewpoints, make a connection with global warming and the current weather events: droughts, hurricane intensity, tornadoes and other events. Al Gore in his book, An Inconvenient Truth, shows pictorial evidence of severe current weather events all over the world that by implication are associated with global warming. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, record tornadoes in the United States, melting glaciers in Montana and Alaska, flood damage in Switzerland, flooding in Mumbai, India, and drought in China and parts of Africa are all depicted as “evidence” in the arguments for global warming. Gore also stated that “a major study from MIT supported the scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes more powerful and more destructive.”

Supporting Websites
Environmental Defense
Live Science

Opposing Viewpoints

Those opposing the views on global warming versus climatic events do not necessarily dispute that the long term effect of warmer oceans, whatever the cause, will indeed result in more intense storms on a statistical basis. However, taking any single event like Hurricane Katrina or the entire 2005 hurricane season and linking it to global warming is viewed as an effort to “sensationalize” the urgency of the arguments for global warming even though the scientific evidence to support the linkages is weak or non existent. After the reduced number of hurricanes in the 2006 and 2007 hurricane seasons alternative theories have been advanced to explain the apparent anomalies.

ICECAP’s website goes further to state that scientists have studied weather extremes such as droughts, floods, hurricane, tornadoes, and heat waves and “come to the opposite conclusion: extreme events are becoming LESS common. Atlantic hurricanes were much more numerous from 1950 to 1975 than from 1975 to present. Hailstorms in the US are 35% less common than they were fifty years ago. Extreme rainfall in the US at the end of the 20th century is comparable to what it was at the beginning of the 20th century”.

Finally, AccuWeather’s Joe Bastardi writing an opinion article in ICECAP has said: “This first colder than normal year [2007] worldwide is one of the signs that we are getting ready to go back to a colder cycle, on the order of 15-20 years”.

Opposing Websites
Real Climate
Reason Online
ICECAP, International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project
ICECAP, Joe Bastardi Article