ABC News: Climate Change No Longer a Theory, It's Happening

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Raging Waters In Australia and Brazil Product of Global Warming
Scientists: Climate Change No Longer a Theory, It's Happening

The pictures today from around the world of dramatic rooftop rescues from raging waters, makes it seem as though natural disasters are becoming an everyday occurrence. But they're not all that natural; climate scientists say man-made global warming is the sudden force behind the forces of nature.

In the mountains of southeast Brazil, more than 340 people have died after fierce mudslides swept away homes. At least 50 are still missing and victims continue to search for loved ones. On the other side of the globe, floods in Queensland, Australia have ravaged an area the size of France and Germany combined.

"Things are pretty devastating," June Lense, a resident of Brisbane, said. And in Sri Lanka, officials say flooding there has affected more than a million people, and the death toll has risen to 23. Sewage lines and holding tanks have overflowed in the floods, and a spokesperson for the health ministry there said officials are concerned about waterborne diseases like typhoid and diarrhea.

"If left unchecked, climate warming will continue so the things that we're having hints of now, foretastes of now, will come stronger," Richard Sommerville, a climate scientist at the University of California at San Diego and author of "The Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change," said.

The extreme weather the world has seen is part of a larger trend, he said. "The world is warming up ... It's warming for sure and science is very confident that most of the warming is due to human causes."

Every time we burn fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, Sommerville said, we emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, climate scientists see "the changed odds, the loaded dice that favors more extreme events and more high temperature records being broken," he said.

The decade that just ended saw nine of the 10 warmest years on record, and warmer temperatures mean more moisture in the air. That moisture can fall as torrential, flooding rains in the summertime or blizzards in the winter.

"Because the whole water cycle speeds up in a warming world, there's more water in the atmosphere today than there was a few years ago on average, and you're seeing a lot of that in the heavy rains and floods for example in Australia," Sommervile said.

Last year tied with the warmest on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Derek Arndt, chief of NOAA's Climate Monitoring Branch in the National Climate Data Center, said 2010 was "an exclamation point on several decades of warming."

He said NOAA is tracking disasters like the floods in Brazil and Australia. "We are measuring certain types of extreme events that we would expect to see more often in a warming world, and these are indeed increasing," Arndt said.

The added moisture in the atmosphere also explains the phenomenon we've seen this week at home -- where snow blanketed the ground in 49 of 50 states. During yesterday's snowstorm, Hartford, Conn. and Albany, N.Y. both set records for snowfall in a single day.

"This is no longer something that's theory or conjecture or something that comes out of computer models," Sommerville said. "We're observing the climate changing -- it's happening, it's real, it's a fact."

ABC News' Julia Bain and The Associated Press contributed to this report.


There is the video of the story here http://abcnews.go.com/International/ext ... d=12610066

Well I guess we're all going to just die, then. Well it's no big deal to me I'm since I'm practically a failure at life anyway. I'm almost 37 and I don't have a job, I can't drive and tasks that other people do on a daily basis without thinking such as chores and hygiene are huge, overwhelming acts of hard labor for me. The only reason I'm not dead or in the hospital right now is my parents who send me extra money every month. All my life I dreamed of becoming a successful cartoonist and a children's story writer/illustrator but these dreams have been crushed horribly. I have almost no real friends and everyone I grew up with had to move away to get real jobs because they're aren't any where I live. So let the world end, and if I somehow don't die that'll be just another thing I suck at doing. Bye.

Depending on how you slice and dice the data, the globe either isn't warming and is actually over the hump and going into a cooling trend, or any change is so small it's lost in instrument error.

I have notice that it's been a mild winter this year. Today's the first day since winter started that the temperature in my area is actually below 15 degrees Farenheit. And on New Year's Eve the high was around 70. Strange for Indiana.

I beleived it was happening a long time ago, because I noticed changes and dissapearances in wild life in the state I grew up in. The flower moths were one of the first to go, and that was over a decade ago. Around here, Tuesday felt like the middle of spring, but Mom came home today saying how cold it was outside. It's been quite unhumid to me for a good while. Meanwhile, in N.M., my father and sister are getting more moisture than us. WTF?! They're in the desert! We're by the ocean! >.<

We need to wait and see if this happens every year to be sure.

...And they were reporting record cold a month ago...

yes people were reporting is being cold a month ago, but guess what, part of climate change includes more extreme weather cycles.

more heat and more cold spells as well.

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One thing i do not want in life is a job feeding a needless cyclical consumption cycle which is a huge drain on the resources of the planet.

i want to help do something which will create more sustainable environment.

something like renewable energy, organic farming, cultivating hemp, environmental biology, recycling.

people need to become aware of the solutions instead of just speculating on the problems and settling for jobs which contribute to the problem.

if every individual who cares about it, such as myself goes a step further to try and encourage those around them that they want a sustainable future we have a better chance of making those changes real.

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This is the second year of heavy winter snow in the northeast and places around the Great Lakes, where glaciers once were during the last ice age.
If the gulf stream is disrupted by the glaciers to the north melting, will there be another ice age? Are these harsher winters in the northern hemisphere the beginning of it?

It may be. I hope it is not but it very well may be.

If Europe is to get a lot colder, than that will damage the ability to farm over there. If this happens, that means more pressure is put onto southern European, Asian and african nations to help import foods.

But, due to our flawed monetary system our finances are away to go down the toilet and foreign exports may be a thing of the past.

Secondly, we need trees to help produce oxygen, absorb water which can contribute to flooding and helps to absorb c02 which could end up acidifying our oceans. If we need to convert forests into farm land nearer to the equitatar than in Europe, i do believe that the food fields are 1/8 of that compared to further north in Europe.

Sure America and other nations are producing a lot of food but their people are their own priority.

People are going to need to learn very soon how to be more self sustainable, otherwise we may be attempting to learn to grow our own food whilst in a food panic.

In peoples opinion , what is the best route we should be taking to prepare and to prevent climate chcange?

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climate change is natural and won't hard the planet

The planet will be fine, but what about the effect we may see on agriculture?

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Regardless of the shifting climate life will go on. At some points in the past the planet had a thicker atmosphere with higher concentrations of different gases then what are typical today. Humans have gone through a few changes in our time on Earth and I'm sure we can survive and adapt to changing conditions, as will the rest of the various life on Earth

I think you might be missing the point here.

Sure we can adapt to a changing environment but not at the rate of change this may happen. If things do go badly when we have too many people to feed unless we take precautions towards sustainable farming.

Yes other creatures adapt, they do not adapt if new circumstances are forced upon them quickly like as we do with ocean acidification.

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