From Jeff Masters at his wunderground.com blog

“Are storms getting more extreme due to climate change? That is a difficult question to answer, since reliable records are not available at all in many parts of the world, and extend back only a few decades elsewhere. However, we do have a fairly good set of precipitation records for many parts of the globe, and those records show that the heaviest types of rains–those likely to cause flooding–have increased in recent years. According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report, “The frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over most land areas”. Indeed, global warming theory has long predicted an increase in heavy precipitation events. As the climate warms, evaporation of moisture from the oceans increases, resulting in more water vapor in the air. According to the 2007 IPCC report, water vapor in the global atmosphere has increased by about 5% over the 20th century, and 4% since 1970. Satellite measurements (Trenberth et al., 2005) have shown a 1.3% per decade increase in water vapor over the global oceans since 1988. Santer et al. (2007) used a climate model to study the relative contribution of natural and human-caused effects on increasing water vapor, and concluded that this increase was “primarily due to human-caused increases in greenhouse gases”. This was also the conclusion of Willet et al. (2007).

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