The Last Frost

Parts of the US, Europe, and Asia have been getting baked by a persistent heat wave. Again I'm cautious to blame this latest episode on global warming, I will say this.

We had better get used to it.

When scientists talk about global warming and global average temperatures, they talk in terms of 1 - 3 degree increases which doesn't sound too bad. The keyword though is average. If you think of the Earth as whole, an extra 1 - 3 degrees globally is a huge increase of energy. Just imagine how much energy it would take to heat the entire freaking planet 1 degree! Now all you need to do is realize that that heat will not necessarily be distrubuted evenly across the globe. So imagine now that all that atmospheric thermal energy just happens to blow over your continent. It's not going to raise temperatures by 1 degree… it may be 20 or 30 or more degrees warmer. The bottom line is, the more energy in the system the more violent the thermal variations can be. This is the basis of the global warming = extreme weather argument.

Extreme weather sweeps continents » [Gulfnews]

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 29th, 2006 at 11:15 am and is filed under Climate Change, Latest News, Weather. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.