A pair of climate scientists has examined the thorny question of whether the cluster of recent extreme weather events has been caused by increasing global temperatures. Their answer? No proof, but it seems likely.
Dim Coumou and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research say that the jury is still out on how – or whether – global warming might influence a specific extreme weather event such as the 2003 European heatwave.
"That such outliers are mere freak events, so called black swans, is a possibility," they write. "However, the recent clustering of outliers makes this seem highly unlikely."....
....That same study, however, also noted that "we may be on the cusp of a period in which the probability of such events increases rapidly, due primarily to the influence of projected increases in greenhouse gas concentrations."
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