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Could it really be that all the crazy weather and extreme activity across the globe is indicative of Climate Change?

The floods battered New England, then Nashville, then Arkansas, then Oklahoma -- and were followed by a deluge in Pakistan that has upended the lives of 20 million people.

The summer's heat waves baked the eastern United States, parts of Africa and eastern Asia, and above all Russia, which lost millions of acres of wheat and thousands of lives in a drought worse than any other in the historical record.

Seemingly disconnected, these far-flung disasters are reviving the question of whether global warming is causing more weather extremes.

The collective answer of the scientific community can be boiled down to a single word: probably.

It's probably the case that as the earth warms, these events start happening more and more frequently, but will there really be a time when we can definitively say, "Yes, Global Warming is causing these extreme weather events"?

Theory suggests that a world warming up because of those gases will feature heavier rainstorms in summer, bigger snowstorms in winter, more intense droughts in at least some places and more record-breaking heat waves. Scientists and government reports say the statistical evidence shows that much of this is starting to happen.

But the averages do not necessarily make it easier to link specific weather events, like a given flood or hurricane or heat wave, to climate change. Most climate scientists are reluctant to go that far, noting that weather was characterized by remarkable variability long before humans began burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

"If you ask me as a person, do I think the Russian heat wave has to do with climate change, the answer is yes," said Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher with NASA in New York. "If you ask me as a scientist whether I have proved it, the answer is no -- at least not yet."

All we have is statistics right now, but they are all pointing in the direction that a warming planet causes more violent weather patterns:

If the earth were not warming, random variations in the weather should cause about the same number of record-breaking high temperatures and record-breaking low temperatures over a given period. But climatologists have long theorized that in a warming world, the added heat would cause more record highs and fewer record lows.

The statistics suggest that is exactly what is happening. In the United States these days, about two record highs are being set for every record low, telltale evidence that amid all the random variation of weather, the trend is toward a warmer climate.

Yes, there are skeptics, but the statistics do not lie:

Climate-change skeptics dispute such statistical arguments, contending that climatologists do not know enough about long-range patterns to draw definitive links between global warming and weather extremes. They cite events like the heat and drought of the 1930s as evidence that extreme weather is nothing new. Those were indeed dire heat waves, contributing to the Dust Bowl, which dislocated millions of Americans and changed the population structure of the United States.

But most researchers trained in climate analysis, while acknowledging that weather data in parts of the world are not as good as they would like, offer evidence to show that weather extremes are getting worse.

A United States government report published in 2008 noted that "in recent decades, most of North America has been experiencing more unusually hot days and nights, fewer unusually cold days and nights, and fewer frost days. Heavy downpours have become more frequent and intense."

Will it be too late when the statistics overwhelmingly point to a warming planet causing extreme weather patterns? Let's hope not...

Read the entire article here.

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