Steroids won't guarantee that a baseball player hits a home run
every time, but the drugs increase the chances of hitting more
home runs across the whole playing season. The greenhouse gases
that are warming the atmosphere and oceans won't guarantee that
we will get more extreme weather events EVERY year, but they
will increase the chances of more extreme weather events over
longer periods. It's already happening. NCAR/UCAR has a great
resource page framed around the baseball on steroids metaphor.
Among the goodies, they offer this two minute cartoon video
explanation. Jeff Masters, a meteorologist and cofounder of the
Weather Underground, describes global warming as like putting
the atmosphere on steroids. He uses this analogy in this PBS
interview in the broadcast “How 2011 Became a ‘Mind-Boggling’
Year of Extreme Weather” that aired on on 28 December 2011.
Watch How 2011 Became a 'Mind-Boggling' Year of Extreme Weather
on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour. And for those who think
climate change has nothing t