FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

New Global Warming Studies: Buy A Raft

This week, the U.S. House of Representatives laid out budget cuts that effectively kill federal government spending on climate change research--at least in 2011. It's not something worth spending money on, in other words. This is, of course, partisan...

This week, the U.S. House of Representatives laid out budget cuts that effectively kill federal government spending on climate change research—at least in 2011. It’s not something worth spending money on, in other words. This is, of course, partisan hysteria and politics being where they shouldn’t (science and research), but their budget notably came out during the same week as two papers in the (apolitical) science journal Nature that link real-life global warming with 2000’s massive floods in England and increased rainfall in general.

Advertisement

Very importantly, this is the first time a link has been studied and evaluated and reached the conclusion that, yes, it’s time to point the finger: this happened because of climate change.

One of the two studies, from the University of Edinburgh, looked at data collected at weather stations all over the Northern Hemisphere and matched it all up to a series of climate models. It didn’t add up. The rainfall numbers collected from the stations couldn’t be explained by anything “normal” and pointed directly at climate change as the culprit.

The second study is even more real. In the fall of 2000, England saw its worst rainfall in 270 years, leading to widespread catastrophic damage: 10,000 properties were flooded, some of them as many as five times. Transportation on the island went into chaos. The grand total of the damage was about $1 billion dollars. (For reference, a years worth of climate change research by NASA goes for just over a billion dollars.)

And, according to a study done at the University of Oxford, global warming nearly doubled the chances of it happening. Which is an increase in likelihood that hasn’t gone away. (This Google Earth overlay lays it out in fairly brutal terms.)

Related:
Global Warming: Our Reaction May Hurt Worse
Global Warming Is Actually Increasing With Less Sun Activity
Prepare For At Least 1,000 Years of Global Warming Punishment

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

Image:

Climate Progress