For a world already torn by various weather catastrophes, the latest caveat from top climate scientists foresees a decidedly grim future: More heat waves, more floods, more droughts and higher costs to deal with them. A draft summary by an international scientific report explains the extremes caused by global warming could eventually grow so rigorous that some locations become “increasingly marginal as places to live.”
The report from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates a change in climate science; that is, from focusing on subtle shifts in average temperatures to concentrating on the even trickier freak events that grab headlines, injure economies and even kill people. Experts on extreme storms have focused closer on the increasing number of super-heavy rainstorms, and not snow.
By the end of the century, the intense, single-day rainstorms that typically happen only once every twenty years now will happen only twice a decade. The summary chapter did not detail what regions of the world could possibly be afflicted by extremes so very awful that they will leave them habitable, marginally only.
There is an 80 percent chance that the recent Russian heat wave of 2010 would not have happened without the added push of global warming. Scientists think that all future hurricanes and other tropical cyclones to have stronger winds, however they will not increase in number and could actually decrease.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel, who studies the climate’s effects on hurricanes, disagrees and believes more of these intense storms will occur.
Well, global warming is not the only villain that will be responsible for future climate disasters.
