Anyone with a computer can now join an Oxford University research project to reveal what role global warming played the UK’s record-breaking wet winter. Flooding in Surrey, UK. Ben Cawthra/Eyevine/eyevine/ZUMA “You can’t link climate change to specific weather events.” That is the accepted wisdom that has been trotted out repeatedly as the wettest winter in at least 250 years battered England and Wales. But the accepted wisdom is wrong: it is perfectly possible to make that link and, as of today, you can play a part in doing so. A new citizen science project launched by climate researchers at the University of Oxford will determine in the next month or so whether global warming made this winter’s extreme deluge more likely to occur, or not. You can sign up here. The weather@home project allows you to donate your spare computer time in return for helping turn speculation over the role of climate change in extreme weather into statistical fact. That debate has been reignited by the devastating winter weather and the flooding and storm damage it wrought (more on that debate here). The research that links global warming to particular extreme weather events is called attribution and has already notched up notable successes. The Oxford team showed in 2011 that climate change was loading the extreme weather dice as far back as 2000, in a study that showed serious flooding in England that year was made two to three times more likely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The killer heat waves in Europe in 2003 and 2010 were also made far more likely by global warming, similar research has demonstrated, while another new study shows how hurricane Katrina would have been far less devastating had it happened a hundred years ago. Read the rest at The Guardian. Link:   Citizen Scientists: Now You Can Link the UK Winter Deluge To Climate Change ; ;Related ArticlesLow-Lying Islands Are Going To Drown, so Should we Even Bother Trying To Save Their Ecosystems?Study: Global Warming Will Cause 180,000 More Rapes by 2099Obama has a good transportation plan. Now we just need to raise the gas tax to pay for it. ;

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Citizen Scientists: Now You Can Link the UK Winter Deluge To Climate Change