Turns out it is weather, more specifically the Jet Stream.
Frozen jet stream links Pakistan floods, Russian fires - environment - 10 August 2010 - New Scientist
So is GW responisible for the blocking events? Probably not. There is no link detected. However there is a correlation between solar activity and the blocking events in Europe. Correlation is not causation but it is worthy of a look if you must waste money down that road.
"So what is the root cause of all of this? Meteorologists are unsure. Climate change models predict that rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will drive up the number of extreme heat events. Whether this is because greenhouse gas concentrations are linked to blocking events or because of some other mechanism entirely is impossible to say. Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado – who has done much of this modelling himself – points out that the resolution in climate models is too low to reproduce atmospheric patterns like blocking events. So they cannot say anything about whether or not their frequency will change.
There is some tentative evidence that the sun may be involved. Earlier this year astrophysicist Mike Lockwood of the University of Reading, UK, showed that winter blocking events were more likely to happen over Europe when solar activity is low – triggering freezing winters (New Scientist, 17 April, p 6)."
Frozen jet stream links Pakistan floods, Russian fires - environment - 10 August 2010 - New Scientist
So is GW responisible for the blocking events? Probably not. There is no link detected. However there is a correlation between solar activity and the blocking events in Europe. Correlation is not causation but it is worthy of a look if you must waste money down that road.
"So what is the root cause of all of this? Meteorologists are unsure. Climate change models predict that rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will drive up the number of extreme heat events. Whether this is because greenhouse gas concentrations are linked to blocking events or because of some other mechanism entirely is impossible to say. Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado – who has done much of this modelling himself – points out that the resolution in climate models is too low to reproduce atmospheric patterns like blocking events. So they cannot say anything about whether or not their frequency will change.
There is some tentative evidence that the sun may be involved. Earlier this year astrophysicist Mike Lockwood of the University of Reading, UK, showed that winter blocking events were more likely to happen over Europe when solar activity is low – triggering freezing winters (New Scientist, 17 April, p 6)."
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