The American Meteorological Society, in it’s Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), has released a report called “Explaining Extreme Events of 2013 from a Climate Perspective.” Three studies looked at excessive heat in Australia, three at drought or dry conditions in California, and 14 looked at various other extreme events (though some of those events may overlap or be related) for a total of about 15 different phenomena.
There was a pattern in the results. The studies looking at heat all suggested a link to anthropogenic global warming (AGW). This is not surprising because AGW has involved a global increase in average temperature which is manifest across a variable climate, so even a modest increase in global temperature, bunched up in to places that are a bit cooler or warmer than average (at a given moment in time) is going to be blatantly obvious when picking out heat events. Some of the studies that looked at the California drought and drought in New Zealand attributed these conditions to climate change, others were more ambiguous or suggested that there was no link. All of the studies that looked at extreme precipitation events concluded that there was no way to make a connection, except one (in Northern India) which as ambiguous.
Read more here: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/10/03/explaining-extreme-events-of-2013-limitations-of-the-bams-report/
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