Fire and water – how global warming is making weather more extreme and costing us money

Connecting the dots between human-caused global warming and specific extreme weather events has been a challenge for climate scientists, but recent research has made significant advances in this area. Links have been found between some very damaging extreme weather events and climate change.

There are several ways in which global warming intensifies drought. Hotter temperatures increase evaporation from soil and reservoirs. They cause more precipitation to fall as rain and less as snow, which for a region like California that relies on the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains as its natural water storage system, is problematic. Hotter temperatures also cause the snowpack to melt earlier in the year. The problem can be alleviated by building more water storage infrastructure, but that costs money.

Global warming is putting extreme weather on steroids. That creates all kinds of costs from more expensive food bills due to drought, to more property damage from higher hurricane storm surges, to higher firefighting costs. Climate contrarians love to exaggerate the costs of reducing carbon pollution, but the even higher costs of allowing global warming to continue are far too often overlooked.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/sep/02/global-warming-making-weather-more-extreme