When most people think of Global Warming, they think "getting hotter." But that's not what we're going to notice first. Scientists have said for awhile now that the first thing we'll notice is extreme weather (fueled by the heat).
Thing is - it takes a lot of degrees of heat for us to notice it personally, but only a little extra heat for storm systems to take notice.
Weather followers have been noticing for years now that the hurricanes seem stronger and more frequent, the droughts longer and more intense, the forest fire season longer and more intense, 100-year floods occurring several times a decade, etc. etc. But there's always been the caveat: these events are local events, and you can't pin local weather events on a global phenomenon like global warming.
No longer.
Two (count 'em) new studies published in yesterday's issue of Nature - one of the planet's most prestigious science journals - does exactly that. In one study, the heavy flooding in the UK was studied and researchers showed that global warming was the only explanation the fit the data. In the second, the increase in rain intensity in the Northern Hemisphere was again shown to be explicable only in terms of global warming.
Global warming isn't a future problem. It's here.
Here's a link the the Nature article: [click]
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