May 19th, 2011

U.S. forecasters say residents of hurricane-prone areas should prepare themselves for an “above-average” hurricane season. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head Jane Lubchenco said the United States was lucky last year that winds steered the storms away from its coasts. But Lubchenco said residents cannot “count on luck” to keep hurricanes away again this season.

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August 24th, 2010

Last fall I posted a blog about the unusual number and severity of extreme weather events that have been striking around the globe for the past several years. That entry focused on the alternating severe drought and heavy flooding in Atlanta in 2007-2009 as an example of the roller coaster ride that climate change is likely to be. As every dutiful scientist does, I stopped short of blaming those individual weather events on global warming, but I am also careful to point out that it is scientifically unsound to claim that the confluence of extreme weather events in recent years is not associated with global warming; I’ll return to this question later.

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December 19th, 2008

From Green Right Now reports

The year 2008 is expected to finish as one of the 10th warmest years on record, since record keeping began more than 150 years ago, according to a report this week from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Also in 2008, Arctic sea ice dropped to its second-lowest level since modern satellite monitoring began in 1979.

The WMO estimates 2008′s global combined sea-surface and land-surface air temperature is about half of a degree Fahrenheit above the annual average temperature of of 57.2°F (14°C) from 1961-1990. However, the global average temperature was slightly lower than in very recent years because of strong La Nina pattern that cooled ocean temps.

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