Friday, March 11, 2011

Missing News: Russian heatwave due to natural factors

ABC were quick to attribute the Russian Heatwave in 2010 to increases in greenhouse gases. However Roger Pielke Jnr reports on a new paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (PDF) that finds otherwise:
The paper concludes:

Our analysis points to a primarily natural cause for the Russian heat wave. This event appears to be mainly due to internal atmospheric dynamical processes that produced and maintained an  intense and long-lived blocking event. Results from prior studies suggest that it is likely that the intensity of the heat wave was further increased by regional land surface feedbacks. The absence of long-term trends in regional mean temperatures and variability together with the model results indicate that it is very unlikely that warming attributable to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations contributed substantially to the magnitude of this heat wave.

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