Nature‘s Jeff Tollefson thinks Christopher Field lying to Congress constituted a good effort. Pretty much says it all about global warming promoters really.
There’s a serious discussion to be had about the link between extreme weather and global warming, particularly in light of the drought, forest fires and severe storms that have wreaked havoc throughout the United States of late. It’s a discussion about assessing and managing risks, the language that we use and the way we frame the questions that we ask. But this is a discussion that did not take place during today’s climate hearing by the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in Washington DC.
It was not for lack of effort on the part of US ecologist Christopher Field, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s second working group on adaptation. Field made the basic scientific case for global warming and talked about scientists’ efforts to quantify the risk of extreme events. He cited studies to suggest that global warming at least doubled the risk of the European heat wave of 2003, for example, but need not be invoked to explain last year’s massive flooding in Thailand.
How does warm weather contribute to forest fires? If hot days contributed ANYTHING to forest fires Florida would be a barren wasteland.
People keep citing Nature as if that means anything anymore. Might as well cite Wikipedia.
A case might be made for blaming global warming as the ‘enhancer’ of extreme weather if there was any.