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More Frequent and Intense Extreme Weather Events Validate Global Warming Models

Connecting the dots and stating what I thought was the obvious, on July 1, I wrote “Heat, Drought Threat Linked to Global Warming”.

Becoming more frustrated, I openly criticized the media’s freak show” coverage of the science in this August post.

But in an earlier April 6, 2010 post “Adapt or Die“, I posed a challenge with this question:

Why is the relationship between global warming and increased storm frequency/intensity/pattern rarely if ever made by the same tired meteorologists quoted in the NJ news stories?

Well, now that the New York Times has broken the ice and answered the same question in a page one story “In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming“, perhaps that gives our NJ State Climatologist and journalists permission to state the obvious and honestly discuss the science.

According to the Times:

The floods battered New Englandthen Nashvillethen Arkansas,then Oklahoma and were followed by a deluge in Pakistan that has upended the lives of 20 million people.

The summer’s heat waves baked the eastern United States, parts of Africa and eastern Asia, and above all Russia, which lost millions of acres of wheat and thousands of lives in a drought worse than any other in the historical record.

Seemingly disconnected, these far-flung disasters are reviving the question of whether global warming is causing more weather extremes.

The collective answer of the scientific community can be boiled down to a single word: probably.

‘The climate is changing” said Jay Lawrimore, chief of climate analysis at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. “Extreme events are occurring with greater frequency, and in many cases with greater intensity.”

OK guys and gals, the Grey Lady, “the paper of record”, has opened the door.

It’s now safe to write the story – you can cite the Times as insulation from the backlash you will get from the global warming deniers out there.

Go for it!

[Update – a friend passed along this information in an email note: I checked the first 3 stories, all of which were after the NY Times story ran. The Times is the news gatekeeper, and they opened the door on and legitimized this story. Other papers frequently follow the lead of the Grey Lady.

Actually, the Washington Post serves the same function and they were the first I saw to begin to connect the dots with this August 11 story: “Huge ice island could pose threat to oil, shipping

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