Hot summers and global warming: Another scientist's view - Los Angeles Times

A report by a longtime global warming researcher has concluded that recent extreme summer weather was linked to climate change. The study by a team led by James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Here's more on the study from Richard Muller, physics professor at UC Berkeley, who for years was a climate-change skeptic but recently declared that he is now convinced that not only is global warming real but that human beings are the overwhelming cause of it.

Convinced he may be, but on Tuesday he said that the report by Hansen was overstating the case. "I agree with his findings, but I think he presents it in a way that greatly exaggerates what the result is,” Muller said on "The Madeleine Brand Show."

Here's an excerpt from the interview explaining what he means by that:

"If we are a degree warmer, which is what he and I agree we have warmed up in the last 50 years -- one degree warmer -- then you will have more heat spells, they'll be a little bit hotter, more records -- but they'll only be one degree. When he says expect more heat waves, what that means is, if you were used to a heat wave of 101 degrees, now you'll have a heat wave of 102.”

Hansen termed this as a 100-year event now becoming  a 10-year event, and Muller doesn't disagree. But, Muller says, it's again worth noting that this much-more-frequent event is just 1 degree warmer.

In an opinion article in the Washington Post, Hansen linked the findings to the "deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year."

Muller said that there is "not even a hint" that global warming can be specifically linked to those events.