By Julie Mitchell
Posted on Dec. 4, 2011. Listed in:
Floods, droughts, freak blizzards, heat waves, horrendous hurricanes—no it’s not the stuff of fiction. According to a report by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) , the weather for the future continues to be stormy. A draft summary of an international report from the world’s top climate scientists says that there is at least a 2-in-3 probability that climate extremes have worsened due to climate change. The report, which will be released later this month after a meeting in Uganda, says that weather catastrophes will cost billions of dollars and make some locations almost unlivable. 
The panel of expert scientists, formed by the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization , focused on extreme weather rather than in subtle shifts in climate. The researchers predict that more heavy single-day rainstorms, along with severe drought like the kind gripping both Texas and the Southwest in the U.S. and in the Mediterranean region during the winter months, will be the result of increased greenhouse gases. More intense monsoons and stronger hurricanes are also expected as warmer air holds more water and delivers more energy to weather systems, changing storm patterns.
According to an article in The Guardian , the IPCC report says that scientists are “virtually certain,” at least 99 percent, that the world will have more extreme episodes of heat and few of cold. In the article, Jeff Masters, Weather Underground meteorology director (who wasn’t involved in the study) said that from June to August in this U.S. there were 2,703 daily high temperature records compared with only 300 cold records, making it the hottest summer since the 1936 Dust Bowl.
The news follows a study released in October by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that said wintertime droughts are becoming more common in the Mediterranean region; in the last 20 years ten of the 12 driest winters have occurred in the area surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.
The study, conducted by the NOAA and colleagues at theCooperative Institute for Research on Environmental Sciences (CIRES) , was published in the Journal of Climate and says that climate change from greenhouse gases explains close to half the increased dryness in the region. Observations and model simulations show a shift to drier conditions in the Mediterranean beginning in the 1970s. NOAA scientists are working to understand changing climates around the world in the hopes that their research will be relevant for the U.S. West Coast that has a similar climate to that of the Mediterranean region of Europe and North Africa.
Images:stormclouds Bigstock
