And as we now know, such effects are not strictly local. As far back as the 1920s, British scientist Sir Gilbert Walker was already puzzling over the fact that monsoons in India had a direct effect on everything from droughts in Africa to the severity of winters in western Canada.
While the rest of the world has not seen the same increase in precipitation as the tropics, earlier computer models generated by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) show that individual rainstorms worldwide will be heavier and more severe as global warming continues. This increase in “precipitation intensity” will be felt in the northern United States, northern Europe, and northern Asia, according to a study published in Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. All of these locales will experience “more intense precipitation for a given storm during this century,” researchers concluded.
Article comments
1 - Howard Dratch
The tropics will see and feel the inundations of global warming and glacial melting first.
Americans may not care much about the tropical world except as resorts but here is a news flash. Where the tropics go so will the sub-tropics -- Florida, Louisiana, Texas.. Then the coastal cities may feel the results of heavy rains in Belize, monsoons in India and typhoons around Borneo.
Earth gets smaller from technology and seems shrunk by the knowledge that every piece of the ecosystem is -- surprise! - systemic.
2 - STM
Explain Australia, then, where the country has been in drought - the sub-tropics especially - for the past six years.
We could use the other moniker to explain it: Climate Change (the British have been using it after predicting another boiling summer but in fact experiencing the coldest for years).
But in fact, in Australia, such extremes of weather - drought, flood, fire, heat - has been going on in an exndless cycle for millions of years.
3 - Dirk Hanson
El Nino has had particularly strong countervailing effects on Australia, according to the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission:
"During El Niño, the abnormally high pressure in the West discourages any destabilizing winds while the low in the East favors storm formation; similarly, the abnormal warming of the ocean in the East feeds any weather disturbance with rain-producing evaporation while the cooling in the West reduces any moisture that is available in the air for rain to form. That is why El Niño episodes bring often DRAMATIC DROUGHTS to Australasia."
4 - STM
The drought has partially broken, but my point is ... we're used to it, and it doesn't seem to be any different to what we've had here for many generations. This isn't the first el nino event I've experienced, and it won't be the last.
While the CSIRO says climate change may have had some role to play in the severity of the drought (although it's not the most svere experienced, even in my lifetime), it falls short of saying that these weather events are caused by global warming. Some people have seized on a few 48C days we had last summer on the East Coast as evidence, but I can remember such days all through my life. And a 35-42C Christmas Day is not unusual in Sydney.
At this stage, too, so far, there has been no discernible warming or cooling of tropical water temperatures in the region (around the equator, for instance, where Thailand's water temperature in the Andaman Sea remains at 25-32C).
And indeed, in tropical northern Australia, it's same sh.t, different day, really. No one is noting any difference in the weather patterns.