Lightning Joins the List of Things Climate Change Is Making Worse - Bloomberg

Lightning Joins the List of Things Climate Change Is Making Worse - Bloomberg: "Lightning puts the fear of god in people, always has. Zeus throws bolts like footballs. Thor conjures it up with his hammer. People make it likelier with all their carbon dioxide pollution.

Wait, what?

A new study in the journal Science reports all that extra energy and moisture in the atmosphere these days may mean more lightning. Every rise in global average surface temperatures of one degree Celsius (about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) could bring with it 12 percent more lightning -- on top of the sea-level rise, warmer winters, hotter summers and other projected threats from climate change. Previous attempts to figure out the relationship between warming and lighting, the authors say, have varied wildly.

The scientists, who are based in California and New York, came up with a new way to estimate the frequency of bolts, or "lightning flash rate." They suggest that the answer is a combination of the amount of energy in the air -- heat -- and the amount of precipitation."



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