14 DAY TRIAL // According to a number of top climate scientists, the heatwaves and wildfires that struck the Russian Federation over the past couple of months were not necessarily caused by global warming.
They do not dispute that the worldwide phenomenon had a role to play, but say that Russian scientists exaggerated when they attributed the entire blame for the devastating events on climate change.
Although their opinions are very well-informed, many critics to these ideas say that numerous events which took place over the past few years may have been caused by global warming, including heat waves, droughts, floods and so on.
Recently, expert Alexander Bedritsky told the Associated Press that the recent weather events, taken together with the things going on in Russia, “are signs of global warming.”
The scientist is the president of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the weather adviser for the Kremlin.
While experts around the world criticize this connection, they admit however that human activities are indeed beginning to trigger some of the events associated with global warming.
“I don't think they got it quite right,” says Kevin Trenberth speaking about Alexander Bedritsky's idea.
The expert, who is a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, believes that “the correct interpretation is that nowadays everything has a component of natural variability and also global warming.”
The difference in interpretation between which of them prevails comes up mostly when either proponents or detractors of global warming are trying to convince others they are right.
No argument as to whether the complex phenomenon exists can be based on a single event or chain of events, researchers agree, but this point seems lost on both sides of the climate change argument.
“We can't say for sure that each event was due to human-caused climate change. But the fact that the events are occurring more often, we can attribute to human-caused climate change,” says Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann.
“We are at the point where we can detect global warming in statistics, but not in individual events,” adds Carnegie Institution for Science global ecologist Ken Caldeira.
“The key observation is that these events are becoming increasingly more common. The Russian heat wave was by some estimates a one-in-a-thousand-year event, but with global warming perhaps it's only a one-in-10-year event now,” Mann adds.
“The way to think of it, though, is that global warming exacerbates the other conditions that would be occurring anyway: The droughts are more intense, last longer and thus elevate wildfire risk,” concludes Trenberth, quoted by OurAmazingPlanet.