Below is a nice map, courtesy of the BBC, showing the shift in the jet stream bringing unprecedented rain and flooding to the UK. As Kim Murphy put it for the Los Angeles Times today:
Few scientists are ready to immediately blame the quirky weather on global warming. For one thing, current climate change trends predict just the opposite in Britain: warmer, drier summers and wetter winters.
"One thing to remember is that what seems to be indicated [with global warming] is much more variability in the climate," [Jon Finch of Oxford U.] said. "So this event, which basically looks like it's a 1-in-200-year event, may with a change in climate come down to a 1-in-50-year event. But that's just speculation."
The jet stream displacement is expected to right itself in the coming weeks, and stay that way through the rest of summer, said Jim Dale, a meteorologist with British Weather Services in High Wycombe.
But note the caveats: "few scientists are ready to immediately blame..." Of course not! No scientist worth his salt is ready to attribute without causal evidence.
But those of us who watched the weather maps in Southern California during our record breaking floods of 2005 saw a similar phenomenon -- an unexplained swing in the jetstream that surprised even the most experienced of climatologists. Usually the jetstream in the winter turns eastward over the West Coast far north of SoCal, but in December and January of 05, it swooped all the way down to Catalina Island...for weeks at a time, causing huge floods, vast damage, and killing quite a few people.
Now reputable climatologists (such as Kelly Redmond) say that swing was "not inconsistent with" global warming, in the murky double negative phrasing that scientists prefer.
Why not drop the "speculation" and say, as we can with assurance, that in the 21st century a warming ocean and atmosphere means increasing overall variability with a far greater chance of climate chaos?
