William H. Calvin
1 min readSep 3, 2021

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That's an interesting political sideline, and I thank you for it. But within the climate science community, 'climate change' became preferred because the threat was a lot more than that from hotter summers; there were new extremes in many aspects of what one calls climate.

During the hiatus in global-average temperature rise between 2001 and 2013, there were surges in five types of extreme weather that were sustained, still with us today. For example, the annual number of severe inland windstorms causing more than $1b damage are currently averaging six times as many as the 1980-2008 baseline average (for 2020, it jumped to ten times). For similarly damaging hurricanes, the baseline stayed flat through 2019. The surges are a much bigger threat than the next fractional degree of overheating, what the big climate reports still like to talk about.

The five surges are discussed at https://WilliamCalvin.org/surge-and-stay

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William H. Calvin
William H. Calvin

Written by William H. Calvin

President, CO2Foundation.org. Professor emeritus, University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. Author, many books on brains, human evolution, climate