Extreme Weather In A Warming World?

Not in Switzerland. It has often been part of the global warming alarmism, that increasing temperatures will bring increasing variance of temperature anomalies, statistically increasing hot weather days, which we know as heat waves. Of course, there is no forcing mechanism explained for why this would be so, but the hypothesis persists and has been included in many GCM's. But climate science is a science, so these things need to be tested. Switzerland, it turns out, is a perfect place to test the variance theory: long historical record, disappearing glaciers, mean surface temperature increase of 2 degrees celsius over the last century. But more hot weather days as the century wore on? No.

This investigation, carried out for a low (Basel) and a high (Saentis) elevation site in Switzerland, has shown that contrary to what is commonly hypothesized climate variability does not necessarily increase as climate warms. Indeed, it has been shown that the variance of temperature has actually decreased in Switzerland since the 1960s and 1970s at a time when mean temperatures have risen considerably. Nevertheless, these findings are consistent with the temperature analysis carried out by Michaels et al. (1998) [that would be usn’s -eds.] where their results also do not support the hypothesis that temperatures have become more variable as global temperatures have increased during the 20th century.

Michaels, who runs World Climate Report, is pretty pleased that he got a mention in the new paper. His reaction: "We’re not going to say we told you so, but … we told you so a decade ago!"