Extremes in Temperature -and in the Handling and Use of Science

摘要

Ours is an age of unprecedented extremes -in the climate system and in politics. Noah Diffenbaugh and colleagues' carefully worded and nu-anced 2017 PNAS paper "Quantifying the influence of global warming on unprecedented extreme climate events" develops methods to attribute heat waves, droughts, and high rainfall to climate change. Similarly, but perhaps counterintuitively, Ju-dah Cohen and colleagues' Nature Communications article from this year links recent increased snowfall and decreased winter temperatures in the eastern United States to a warming Arctic. The Earth's climate is a complex system, and one's simple intuition of cause and effect is not always correct. There are lots of subtleties.