We’ve been seeing cor­re­la­tions between climate change and local­ized bio­log­ical events for many years. Now we’ve begun to see research linking climate change to regional and even global outcomes. In the last few months there’s been seperate studies sug­gesting a global warming driver behind extreme rainfall events, flooding, and now inter­na­tional food prices.

These are all inter­esting and alarming findings on their own. It’s also inter­esting that some com­bi­na­tion of increasing mag­ni­tude of climate change and increasing intre­pid­ness of research method­ology is facil­i­tating continent-​​scale climate outcome analysis. It’s one thing to identify a general trend of change in the climate. It’s another thing to move on from averages to spotting trends in extreme moments and changes in fre­quen­cies of outlier events. It’s another thing again to credibly link those trends and vari­ances to specific outcomes big enough for people to care. Continental weather patterns are com­pli­cated systems with multi-​​step chains of causality. That’s hard to see through. Especially when you’re stacking a layer of eco­nomics on top of geo-​​physical systems, as in the case of food prices. But that doesn’t mean that climate won’t have serious outcomes at the local, regional and global level, and that means we very much need to try to spot those as soon as we can.

It’s also inter­esting to consider what effect these kinds of studies might have on opinion and policy, if science and media can get along well enough to effec­tively artic­u­late them to the public and to gov­ern­ments. The like­li­hood of climate change hasn’t been enough to motivate us to prevent it. Maybe the iden­ti­fi­able presence of the con­se­quences of climate change in our everyday life will be. That’s not just a science problem, although its surely that. Its also very much a com­mu­ni­ca­tions problem. But I’m glad the science is being done.