New IPCC Report Warns of Extreme Weather to Increase Due to Climate Change
Posted on November 19, 2011
A report released by the the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that extreme weather will become more frequent and more severe due to climate change. The report says certain areas of the Earth will become "increasingly marginal as places to live."
The report said that incidents such as the severe drought in the horn of Africa and the 2010 Russian heat wave will become commonplace. The IPCC says these events are virtually certain, they define as having a probability of 99–100%. The report says that it is clear that major climate events will occur, however it is not possible to predict smaller, local events such as mudslides, floods or tropical storms. For the first time, the report also states which areas of research are full of uncertainty. There are research gaps, say the scientists, which do not allow current models to predict exactly how weather patterns will change.
A summary of the report was released today at the IPCC meeting in Kampala, Uganda. More than 100 scientists compiled research over the past 2 1/2 years to create the report which draws on thousands of published studies on climate change. The full report will be released next week.
Thomas Stocker, a climate scientist at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and head of the IPCC's physical sciences group, had this to say about future effects of climate change: "We are more confident now than we have been before that climate change will amplify the number of unusually warm days and that it will in many regions also affect precipitation patterns."
The report says that it does not have sufficient evidence to specifically link cyclones to climate change. But it has near certainty that parts of the globe are going to become pretty much uninhabitable.