Photograph by Greta Rybus, Sipa/AP Published February 15, 2013
BOSTON—Wildfires. Droughts. Super storms. As opposed to
representing the unfortunate severe weather headlines of the
last year, scientists said Friday that climate change has
increased the likelihood of such events moving forward. And
though the misery is shared from one U.S. coast to another,
scientists speaking at the annual American Association for the
Advancement of Science meeting in Boston said, the type of
extreme event may vary significantly from region to region.
(Related: "6 Ways Climate Change Will Affect You.") Heat waves
have become more frequent across the United States, with western
regions setting records for the number of such events in the
2000s, said Donald Wuebbles, a geoscientist with the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But the Midwest and Northeast
have experienced a 45 percent and 74 percent increase,
respectively, in the heaviest rainfalls those regions have seen
since 1950. The extreme drought that plagued Texa