2nd July - Today's News: Extreme Weather Events Linked to Climate Change?

It's interesting to see that a year ago today I was reporting on Britain's driest 6 months for 80 years. Not sure how it stands across the country this year, but in Evesham I've recorded just 160.2mm in the first six months of the year, just 55% of average.

Extreme weather link 'can no longer be ignored'

The Met Office and NCAR have joined forces with other climate organisations, including the influential US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organisation (NOAA), to carry out detailed investigations of extreme weather events, such as the vast flooding in Pakistan last year, to see whether they can detect a climate change “signal” as a likely cause.

A group of their researchers has formed a coalition called the Attribution of Climate-Related Events which is preparing a report on the subject to be published later this year at a meeting of the World Climate Research Programme in Denver. They hope in future to assess each extreme weather phenomenon in terms of its probability of being linked with global warming and then to post the result on the internet.

It would, of course, be unwise for me to comment until the report is published.

There'll be less July 4 sparkle as US fireworks displays snuffed, with in many cases the weather being cited as the reason - drought, wildfires, and in some places, flood.

Spectacular lightning storm electrifies Chicago skyline with 1,100 strikes in 1 hour Nice pictures!

Tropical storm kills 3 in Mexico

BBC forecasters rapped for overdoing the barbeque chat

In India, heavy rain halts Amarnath Yatra

NASA's Aura satellite measures pollution from New Mexico, Arizona fires

Plastic found in nine percent of 'garbage patch' fishes - and thats only the observable stuff. If you want to be really scared, read The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Unless you have a serious plastic fetish, it may well put you off seafood for life.

And finally, has Anthony Watts come out of the closet? Regarding a study that finds cleaner air but a warmer Europe, he wonders:

.... if the temperature dip in the 1970′s where everyone was worried about global cooling wasn’t partially driven by atmospheric aerosols. With the advent of pollution controls, certainly we have cleaner (and more optically transparent) skies since then.

So no global cooling after all - but what then has been causing the warming for so long ......? And if humans can affect the temperature one way, then .....? Ooh, careful there Antony! And I see some of his followers have expressed concern as well.