Frequency of Northern Hemisphere Temperature Anomalies Relative to 1950-1980 Norm (X-Axis is Local Standard Deviation From Norm)

People get bored.  Climate change is old news, but there are lots of things with more immediate interest: the economy, the presidential race, the Summer Olympics, the latest celebrity scandal. But Nature never gets bored. Nature just keeps working away. Greenhouse gases are still in the atmosphere and increasing all the time, and so is climate change — whether or not we’re paying attention.  And in fact, as the graph above shows, climate change is already resulting in a lot more places with extremely hot summers.

The graph is from a paper by James Hansen.  He’s written about the paper in the Washington Post:

Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and ...

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