Does extreme weather add up to climate change?

I have no trouble remembering a time when a drought was just that: a drought. Sure, even as we lapped up the sunshine and enjoyed our ice cream, we were concerned about our gardens and the crops our farmer friends were tending. But no one doubted then, that the drought would come to an end – sometime.

But things are not that way anymore. Now we have extreme weather, and we wonder: is this just another weather cycle, or are we beginning to experience climate change. There can be little doubt that we are experiencing extreme weather. For us in Manitoba it began with the record flooding on the Assiniboine River in the spring of 2011. That was followed by the record dry summer in 2011, an extremely warm winter, and now again record high temperatures and prolonged drought.

Britain by contrast has been incredibly wet. The reporting leading up to the Olympics refers to this every evening. The wettest April ever was followed by the wettest June (more than double average rainfall), and July has started the same way.

Russia had its hottest summer ever in 2010, with peat wildfires raging out of control — over 5,000 excess deaths in Moscow in July alone — but this summer it’s wet in Russia too.

This past week we have been hearing about flash floods in China

One could go on, enumerating extreme weather events in Australia and the US, but in fact, they are all just anecdotal. Anecdotes – extreme weather events – do not prove that climate change is occurring.

So can we say anything about climate change with absolute certainty? Well, no, we can’t. It is just possible that all of the events we are witnessing are just a random collection of extreme events that signify nothing at all. But it’s a long-shot. Occasionally a tossed coin comes up heads six times in a row. But usually it doesn’t.

Were global warming actually occurring we would not feel it. If the actual temperature of our planet went up one or two degrees, we would not notice this. The glaciers and the polar ice caps may be affected, and, say the climate scientests, the weather would get wilder.

We never really experience the climate; what we feel is the daily weather that it produces. A climate that is changing will produce unfamiliar weather — and if it is getting warmer, it will be more energetic weather. Wilder weather, if you like.

That means hotter, longer heat waves, and bigger storms that bring torrential rain and killer wind speeds. But it can also mean prolonged droughts as rainfall patterns change — and much more severe winters, like the “Snowmageddon” storm that hit Washington in February 2010 and shut down the U.S. federal government for a week.

You can’t prove that all this means we are sliding into a new and steadily worsening climate right now — that the long-threatened future has arrived.

The statistics aren’t good enough to support that conclusion yet. But if you have to put your money down now, bet yes.


By Eric Rempel