Climate change will accelerate extreme weather events in the coming years

Humanity is now facing an ever-increasing threat of unpredictable and extreme weather, climate scientists warn.

This Jan. 4 Geocolor image from the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) GOES-16 satellite captured the record
"bomb cyclone" nor’easter that battered the
 East Coast of the United States in January 2018.

While global warming is creating more powerful storms and record-breaking, drought-driven wildfires, it would be a mistake to view these events as the “new normal,” they say. The planet has not reached a new climate stability, so the years ahead could be quite a lot worse.

“‘New normal’ implies that we reach some new sort of equilibrium and that's where things stay, whereas what we're looking at is an ever-shifting baseline,” says Penn State professor and atmospheric scientist Michael Mann.

Read the PRI story by Adam Wernick - “Climate change will accelerate extreme weather events in the coming years.”