“We’re not at a state in the science where we can attribute any single storm to climate change. We just can’t. It’s too early,” said Auroop Ganguly, a senior researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory whose primary research interests include climate extremes and climate change uncertainties.
Generally speaking, Ganguly said, the computer-driven models of global climate change look at longer-term trend lines that are gaining credibility and detail as supercomputers become more powerful and modeling techniques improve.
“When we have warming scenarios, we do see intensification of storms in the future to which we can assign some credibility,” he said.
Conceptually, there’s a good physical basis for that to occur with additional warming in the atmosphere and the oceans, Ganguly said. But, at this point, those projections are not detailed or site-specific, he said.
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/jun/26/storms-tied-to-warming/
“I think the most that we can say right now with some degree of credibility for a relatively focused region like East Tennessee is that it does seem that heat waves could potentially grow more intense. On average, we’ll see warming. But what we are also seeing is that the Southeast, in general, may not show as much warming as some other regions of the U.S.”
The SE US has been cooling for the last 100 years.
