Politico (!) Posts Article From Climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf On Why Europe's Weather Is So Fucked
EDIT
It’s not just that the weather is doing what it always does, except at a higher temperature level. Rather, there is growing evidence that the dynamics of weather itself are changing.
Let’s take a look at a concrete example. In my home town Potsdam, near Berlin — which boasts a high-quality weather station with uninterrupted homogeneous data since 1893 — April was the warmest April since measurements began, and May was the warmest May. Although June and July did not set any new records — those were recorded in 2003 and 2006 — they were also among the warmest. Just how extraordinary the current hot weather anomaly really is can best be seen when looking at the period between April and July.
We see a steady climate warming of around 2 degrees Celsius in the smooth climate curve since 1980, in parallel to global warming but twice as fast. This is typical of continental areas; ocean areas warm less due to heat storage and evaporation. We also see that 2018 was a whopping 4.3 degrees above the average value of the first 30 years in which data was measured, and nearly 2 degrees above the smoothed climate curve. This is by far the largest outlier relative to the climate curve. What’s going on?
A naive way to estimate the contribution of climate change to the high temperatures goes something like this: The smoothed curve shows the effect of global warming, and the scattering of the grey bars around this curve is the random variations of the weather. Accordingly, slightly more than half of the 4.3 degrees would be due to global warming, the rest to weather. That’s not a bad first estimate, but it likely underestimates the contribution of climate change. Not only is the current outlier by far the biggest, there is growing evidence that the “rest of the weather” is not just random but has already been altered by climate change too.
EDIT
https://www.politico.eu/article/climate-change-gobal-warming-freak-weather-explained/
