Public Perception of Climate Change and the New Climate Dice

Abstract

"Climate dice", describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons relative to climatology, have become progressively "loaded" in the past 30 years, coincident with rapid global warming. The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased. An important change is the emergence of a category of summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (3σ) warmer than climatology. This hot extreme, which covered much less than 1% of Earth's surface in the period of climatology, now typically covers about 10% of the land area. It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming, because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small. We discuss practical implications of this substantial, growing, climate change.

arXiv comment19 pages, 12 figures; submitted to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

References in corpus (5)

• Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?
• Target atmospheric CO2: Supporting material
• Earth's Energy Imbalance and Implications
• Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change
• Scientific Case for Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change to Protect Young People and Nature

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms: Evidence from Paleoclimate Data, Climate Modeling, and Modern Observations that 2°C Global Warming is Dangerous
• Climate-mediated shifts in temperature fluctuations promote extinction risk
• Transdisciplinary electric power grid science
• Modulation of the occurrence of heat waves over the Euro-Mediterranean region by the intensity of the Atlantic Multidecadal Variability
• An exactly solvable record model for rainfall
• A comparison of two methods for detecting abrupt changes in the variance of climatic time series
• Components of multifractality in the Central England Temperature anomaly series
• Exponential Family Trend Filtering on Lattices