Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Trenberth on drought: "This is certainly a symptom of climate change...We believe we can prove the relationship between the warming we are seeing and these changes in the atmosphere that comes from humans…"

In a Kansas Corn Field, Drought Points to the Need for Climate Solutions | Rocky Kistner's Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC
[farmer] Berning says the heat is as brutal as he’s ever seen. But ask him what he thinks is causing it and he shrugs. “In my mind I’ve thought it goes in cycles so I’m not into the science based stuff very much.”

That’s pretty much what most farmers around here say.
...
Just a few hundred miles from Bernings’s rain-starved corn fields, Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, says the links between greenhouse gas emissions and the drought now parching the nation are becoming increasingly clear.

“This is certainly a symptom of climate change,” Trenberth told us in an on-camera interview near his Colorado Springs office. “We believe we can prove the relationship between the warming we are seeing and these changes in the atmosphere that comes from humans…. the magnitude of the drought, the intensity of it, the duration of it is apt to be greater because of the human influence… the underreporting of the climate relationship to everything that’s going on around us is also part of the problem.”

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