#2 Anthropocene...knowledge = responsibility

This post was inspired by a quote I read on an online forum written by climatologists which I think sums up the key message of this blog post pretty well:

"The power that humans wield is unlike any other force of nature – it can be used, withdrawn or modified. That knowledge gives us great responsibility.'

It made me think, are we influencing extreme weather if we are influencing the climate?

The answer is that there has been a marked increase in the "frequency,intensity and duration of some extreme weather events" as a result of anthropogenically induced warming. So yes, climate change is clearly affecting the setting that produces our daily weather...and therefore surely also our extreme events? I’m not sure the answer is so straightforward, and I hope to study this in greater detail over the coming weeks.

I will be talking a lot about “anthropogenically induced climate change”, so I want to quickly run through roughly what that entails.

Trends in many global indicators - notably methane andcarbon dioxide - suggest that humans have actually changed the earth so much that at some point in the past 11,500 years we actually have moved into a new epoch: the Anthropocene. The start of this is debated, but the key principle at the moment is to appreciate that we have changed the Earth's natural system...

Source: Steffen et al., 2015: Trends from 1750 to 2010 in globally aggregated indicators for socio-economic development. 


...and this all influences the way in which we experience weather events. 

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