Global Warming Update 2/18/2011

Today's global warming update is on how the increased flooding risk in the United Kingdom is being linked to global warming.

Earlier studies have shown that global warming has more than doubled the likelihood of these severe weather events, with more intense rain and snow and greenhouse gases polluting the atmosphere.

"Climate models have improved a lot since ten years ago, when we basically couldn't say anything about rainfall," says Gabriele Hegerl, a climate researcher at the Univ. of Edinburgh, UK.

The researchers gathered data from multiple weather stations in the northern hemisphere with precipitation simulations from eight climate models.

"We can now say with some confidence that the increased rainfall intensity in the latter half of the twentieth century cannot be explained by our estimates of internal climate variability," she says.

The second of the studies was linking climate change to damaging floods in England and Wales. Running thousands of "high-resolution seasonal forecast simulations with or without the effect of greenhouse gases", the resarchers at the Univ. of Oxford, UK determined that anthropogenic climate change nearly doubled the risk of the extremely wet weather that was caused during the floods

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