Climate Change: The New Bogeyman
More and more I read and hear climate change is the cause of some extreme event. The AGU reported "Climate Change to blame for Hurricane Maria's Extreme Flooding", a shameful rendering of an excellent paper by Keellings and Ayala that made no such claim. The Guardian had the recent flooding in England as part of their Climate Change section when really it was terrible and catastrophic weather. And a qualified engineer recently told me that Cyclone Idai was caused by climate change. It seems that climate change has become the new bogeyman used to blame for all meteorological extreme events.
Climate models may show that global warming increases the likelihood of events like these occurring, but we cannot say that climate change caused them. We must ask ourselves, have events like these occurred in the past and is the present event within the range of possible events found in a pre-industrial climate (whenever and whatever that albion was)?
Alastair Clarke
26 August, 2019