Has climate change already caused extreme weather events? It's a tough question to answer, and not only because the public debate over the prospect has been hotter than the climate itself. A couple of papers in this week's edition of Nature attempt to tackle the issue and show that extreme weather events are becoming more common in our warming world. In one case, the challenge of doing so was so high, it was "beyond available conventional supercomputing resources," so the researchers turned to a distributed computing system that ran climate models as screensavers.
Logically, a warming climate would be expected to increase the rate of extreme weather events. A higher atmospheric temperature represents an increased energy content; it can also mean an increased content of water vapor, which could lead to excessive precipitation. Still, extreme weather events have been with us throughout Earth's history, so attributing any single one to a warming climate isn't a simple thing.
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