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Published on Friday, April 29, 2011 by Mongabay.com
http://news.mongabay.com/2011/0428-hance_extremeweather_us.html
by Jeremy Hance
The short answer to the question of whether or not on-going floods in the US Midwest and fires in Texas are linked to a warming Earth is: maybe. The long answer, however, is that while it is difficult—some argue impossible—for scientists to link a single extreme weather event to climate change, climate models have long shown that extreme weather events will both intensify and become more frequent as the world continues to heat up. In other words, the probability of such extreme events increases along with global average temperature.
"There have always been extreme events," Peter Stott, a climatologist from the UK’s Met Office, told Yale360 in a piece on extreme weather and climate change. "Natural variability does play a role, but now so does climate change. It is about changing the odds of the event happening."