Study: Think you're hot now? Just wait a few years

[unhappycamper]

Study: Think you're hot now? Just wait a few years
By Randolph E. Schmid
AP Science Writer / July 8, 2010

WASHINGTON — Folks sweating out the heat wave battering parts of the country may just have to get used to it.

As global warming continues such heat waves will be increasingly common in the future, a Stanford University study concludes.

"In the next 30 years, we could see an increase in heat waves like the one now occurring in the eastern United States or the kind that swept across Europe in 2003 that caused tens of thousands of fatalities," Noah Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford, said in a statement.

Diffenbaugh and Moetasim Ashfaq, a former Stanford postdoctoral fellow now at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, used a series of computer models of climate to calculate changes in the future with increased levels of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere. Their findings are reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

They calculate that within 30 years average temperature could be 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 Celsius, higher than in the mid-1800s.