http://columbia.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0ebaeb14fdbf5dc65289113c1&id=838bc7c9d3&e=96f7f2ab55

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20111110_NewClimateDice.pdf

Climate Variability and Climate Change:
The New Climate Dice

J. Hansen, M. Sato, R. Ruedy

Abstract.

The "climate dice" describing the chance of an unusually warm or cool season, relative to the climatology of 1951-1980, have progressively become more "loaded" during the past 30 years, coincident with increased global warming. The most dramatic and important change of the climate dice is the appearance of a new category of extreme climate outliers. These extremes were practically absent in the period of climatology, covering much less than 1% of Earth's surface. Now summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (σ) warmer than climatology, typically cover about 10% of the land area. Thus there is no need to equivocate about the summer heat waves in Texas in 2011 and Moscow in 2010, which exceeded 3σ – it is nearly certain that they would not have occurred in the absence of global warming. If global warming is not slowed from its current pace, by mid-century 3σ events will be the new norm and 5σ events will be common.