Forget the anecdotes and face the facts: weather always fluctuates. Arctic springs and angry summers are not oddities
The east wind could cut tungsten, the daffodils are weeks behind and the first chiffchaffs are late. It’s a cold spring and the two things everybody seems to agree upon are that there’s something weird about the weather and it’s our fault. Both are almost certainly wrong.
On weird weather it is true that the contrast with last year’s warm March is striking, as is the difference between the incessant rain of the past 12 months and the long drought that preceded it in most of England. In the past year America has had a heatwave, a superstorm and now a bitterly cold spring. Australia has just had an “angry summer”. And so on.
Sir John Beddington, the Government’s retiring chief scientist, claimed this week that we are seeing more variability. Is he right? On the whole, no. Forget the anecdotes and examine the data.
Start with America. Professor Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado has documented that floods, hurricanes, tornados and East Coast winter storms have shown no increase since the 1950s, while droughts have shown a slight decrease. The only thing that has changed is the financial damage done by storms, but as he drily remarks, “The actual reason for the increasing number of damaging tropical storms has to do with the reporting of damages.”
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article3723862.ece
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