The Weather Isn't Getting Weirder

[Timna]

The Weather Isn't Getting Weirder

The latest research belies the idea that storms are getting more extreme.

By ANNE JOLIS

Last week a severe storm froze Dallas under a sheet of ice, just in time to disrupt the plans of the tens of thousands of (American) football fans descending on the city for the Super Bowl. On the other side of the globe, Cyclone Yasi slammed northeastern Australia, destroying homes and crops and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

Some climate alarmists would have us believe that these storms are yet another baleful consequence of man-made CO2 emissions. In addition to the latest weather events, they also point to recent cyclones in Burma, last winter's fatal chills in Nepal and Bangladesh, December's blizzards in Britain, and every other drought, typhoon and unseasonable heat wave around the world.

But is it true? To answer that question, you need to understand whether recent weather trends are extreme by historical standards. The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is the latest attempt to find out, using super-computers to generate a dataset of global atmospheric circulation from 1871 to the present.

As it happens, the project's initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. "In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years," atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871."

The Weather Isn't Getting Weirder - WSJ.com

[arapahoepark]

Lol it's funny how people think this is so wierd.
We had a mini-ice age a couple hundred years ago....Along with that also 200 years ago Mt. Tambora erupted in Indonesia, and the following year was called the year without a summer in europe. It snowed brown and red in summer! Hail storms happened also, so exactly how different is this weather from awhile back?
Great post!