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godzilla 2 September 2006 Global Warming 113 views No Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

Associated Press

AP reported by SETH BORENSTEIN that in the month of August, most of the United States will see “above normal temperatures,” forecasters say. For the long-term future, the world will see more and worse killer heat waves because of global warming, scientists say.

The July burst of killer heat waves around the world can’t be specifically blamed on global warming. And they aren’t the worst ever – they still can’t quite hold a melting candle to the scorching heat of America’s 1930s Dust Bowl. But the trend is pointed in that direction, experts say.

Heat waves and global warming “are very strongly” connected, said Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis branch chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. The immediate cause of the California heat wave – and other heat waves – is day-to-day weather, he said.

A persistent high pressure system in the upper atmosphere prevents cooler jetstream air, from making it into the West, said National Weather Service meteorologist Dennis Feltgen. “You can’t tie global warming into one single event,” he said.

But what global warming has done is make the nights warmer in general and the days drier, which help turn merely uncomfortably hot days into killer heat waves, Trenberth said.

Much of global warming science concentrates on average monthly and yearly temperatures, but recent studies in the past five years show that climate change is at its most dangerous during extreme events, such as high temperatures, droughts and flooding, he said.

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