Seeking better answers to climate change, extreme weather questions
The Reston North Park & Ride commuter lot is covered with flood water on September 8 on in a “1 in 500 year flood”. ( Olga Bogatyrenko )
The United States has suffered from a record number of billion dollar natural disasters this year, from the Mississippi and Missouri River flooding to Hurricane Irene and the Texas drought. With each of these events, many have wondered - did climate change have anything to do with this?
Reporters and members of the public wanted to know: has climate change vaulted us into a new normal, as some climate scientists have warned for years, in which these kinds of devastating events will occur more frequently, and be more severe? Or is this just one awful and anomalous year?
Depending on the extreme event, climate science has provided some answers, but they have contained significant caveats, largely because the links between climate change and specific extreme weather events are tenuous, and only now being investigated using methods that are showing greater promise.
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