Perception of climate change
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Material Information

Title:
Perception of climate change
Creator:
James Hansen
Makiko Sato
Reto Ruedy
Affiliation:
Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Trinnovim LLC
Publisher:
National Academy of Science
Publication Date:
Language:
English

Subjects

Subjects / Keywords:
climate change
heat waves
global warming

Notes

Abstract:
“Climate dice,” describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons, have become more and more “loaded” in the past 30 y, coincident with rapid global warming. The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased. An important change is the emergence of a category of summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (3σ) warmer than the climatology of the 1951–1980 base period. This hot extreme, which covered much less than 1% of Earth’s surface during the base period, now typically covers about 10% of the land area. It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small. Wediscuss practical implications of this substantial, growing, climate change.

Record Information

Source Institution:
Florida International University
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