Warming up

For those of you surfing regularly (the Net), pictures of the dust storm in Phoenix in the US give some amazing real footage. The stuff of photoshop, but this one is for real!

Such extreme events are becoming the norm. And there is consensus that this is a direct outcome of climate change. In this year alone, tornadoes have ripped through the nation, mighty rivers like the Mississippi and Missouri have flowed over their banks, and floodwaters have covered huge swaths of Australia as well as displaced more than five million people in China and devastated Colombia. Last year there were the record floods in Nashville, Tenn., and Pakistan monsoon that killed 1,500 people and left 20 million more homeless, and Russia's crippling heat wave.

Munich Re, one of the world's largest reinsurance companies, has compiled the world's most comprehensive database of natural disasters, reaching all the way back to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Researchers at the company add 700 to 1,000 natural catastrophes to the database each year. The data indicates a small increase in geologic events like earthquakes since 1980 because of better reporting. But the increase in the number of climate disasters is far larger.

The second line of evidence comes from a nascent branch of science called climate attribution. The idea is to examine individual events like a detective investigating a crime, searching for telltale fingerprints of climate change. Those fingerprints are showing up—in the autumn floods of 2000 in England and Wales that were the worst on record, in the 2003 European heat wave that caused 14,000 deaths in France, in Hurricane Katrina.

Global warming is warming up and getting real close.