Beryl's Last Stand

The 2012 Atlantic hurricane season officially began on June 1, 2012 and will officially end on November 30, 2012, dates which conventionally delimit the period when most tropical cyclones develop in the Atlantic basin. However, this  season began early when Tropical Storm Alberto and Tropical Storm Beryl both developed several days before the official start of the season, the first such occurrence since the 1908 Atlantic hurricane season. We are getting the end of Tropical Storm Beryl in Ireland at the moment (as I look out the window sheeting rain and flooded fields) – according to met eireann Meteorologist Gerald Fleming the forecast was for "a month's rain in two days". Munster and Connacht are expected be the worst affected with up to 60mm of rainfall expected.

Scientific American reports in an article about extreme flooding events: “"Big rain events and higher overnight lows are two things we would expect with [a] warming world," says Deke Arndt, chief of the National Climatic Data Center’s Climate Monitoring Branch. Arndt's group had already documented a stunning rise in overnight low temperatures across the U.S. So are the floods and spate of other recent extreme events also examples of predictions turned into cold, hard reality? Increasingly, the answer is yes. Scientists used to say, cautiously, that extreme weather events were "consistent" with the predictions of climate change. No more. "Now we can make the statement that particular events would not have happened the same way without global warming," says Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. That's a profound change—the difference between predicting something and actually seeing it happen. The reason is simple: The signal of climate change is emerging from the "noise"—the huge amount of natural variability in weather.”