"The words “extreme weather” are rarely associated in the mainstream media with another two words: “global warming.”
But scientists argue these extreme weather events are consistent with changes they have long predicted would accompany global warming."

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/16/extreme_weather_global_warming_floods_in

It's really scarey, and with the floods in China I heard 2 million acres of crops were damaged. Along with the damaged crops in the Midwest food prices are going to sky rocket. We better store up all the food we can because I fear the end is near.

More bad news for the home heating season up north. Natural gas prices are about double what they were this time last year. You can imagine what they will be like this winter.

quote:

The words “extreme weather” are rarely associated in the mainstream media with another two words: “global warming.”

Yes, they are.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=extreme+weather+global+warming

Doing that just now has articles or opinion pieces from the Washington Post, New York Times, and Chicago Tribune talking about global warming and extreme weather within the first 7 stories. (Your mileage may vary slightly due to Google News always being a bit of a moving target.)

There's no doubt we'll be hit by some price pressures on food. But to put 2 million acres in perspective...Saudi Arabia has 8 million acres of farm land. Any given year we have crop failures in different parts of the country and the world.

At any rate, along with any weather pattern changes there are some old reasons where we I'd bet we can draw stronger conclusions of cause-and-effect.

We have more land being drained faster -- both paved areas, as well as farmland that is "tiled" (drains installed under the soil); we likely have less wetlands despite regulations to slow the loss of it and government programs to take land near rivers out of production. Soil organic matter is down from the beginning of the 20th century.

If you look at New England, many of the mill villages now protected by Army Corps dams didn't flood back in the 1830s when houses were built where they were. But by the 1860s it was already recognized issues such as deforestation was leading to faster run-off; and rivers were silting in enough to actually raise them higher so it took less water to reach the top of the banks.

Those issues would be with us wether or not we're causing more frequent severe weather.

Matt from CT misses the point.

quote:
The words “extreme weather” are rarely associated in the mainstream media with another two words: “global warming.”

The point is not NEVER, the point is rarely. And as one who has watched hundreds of hours of Cable News - because I like to know what the mainstream news is putting out there - I have NEVER heard the association between extreme weather and climate change made. That is after hundred of hours watching flooded property.

Cable news is where the vast majority of people in the country get their news. The vast majority of the people look at headlines and do not "google". So the vast majority of the people did not hear anyone make the connection. THAT is the point. It would be absurd to claim that NO ONE is making the connection.

If you are an old fart, like me, you will remember plenty of extreme weather- heat waves and floods and droughts and tornados and hurricanes and...
I remember a National Geographic issue in the 1970's, I believe, about the terrible weather year with floods, etc. One of my favorite recent cartoons shows a weatherman in front of a map labeled "25 years ago" announcing, "It's a summer heat wave" and in different clothes in front of the same map labeled "Today" announcing, "It's global warming". (The cartoon is by Glen McCoy.)

I'm afraid not everyone is going to find the previous poster's climate change humor so funny:

"The World Health Organization estimated that climate change was already causing more than 150,000 deaths per year in 2000. The World Health Organization is engaged in an update of that work. We’ll soon have a new estimate, a more recent estimate, and it will be larger, in terms of how many people are already being killed by climate change, by floods, by heat waves, by droughts, by expanded range of malaria, and much more."

ROFL

They're not dying from climate change.

They're dying from poverty.

And the solution to poverty is not liberal guilt that we're killing the planet, it's applying what we know are effective strategies against poverty.

Literacy. Education. Scientific research to develop locally productive agriculture systems. Urbanization and Industrializaiton -- get the people to transform from a low productivity, near subsistence agriculture system to one needing fewer child laborers and less land...with the surplus labor moving to town and factory and office jobs. That's not incompatible with organic farming techniques, either. Many of the people clearing rain forests or living in flood plains simply do not have the knowledge or means to do otherwise.

I have a lot more respect for Nigerian rebels complaining oil profits are not being fairly used to develop the economy of the Niger delta, then I do with WHO trying to lay a guilt trip by trying to say global warming is killing people. One group has a very verifiable and clear point. The other doesn't.

The change in climate is a fraction of a degree. How many people were killed by floods, heat waves and droughts 10, 20, 30 or 40 years ago? How many of the floods, droughts etc. were caused by poor land use? I can remember people starving in Biafra and numerous other places. We had a huge drought in this country back in the time of the dust bowl and it wasn't "climate change". It is just the latest of trendy phrases which helps bring in the dollars when nothing else will, while at the same time taking a dig at us. Not to say that people don't deserve help, they do. But beyond immediate aid, better land use planning would help more than trying to lay blame.