CBS Evening News Blames Thursday’s Severe Weather on Global Warming

PELLEY: “Well, this was also the day that government scientists said 14 of the last extreme weather events were made worse by climate change caused by pollution. Examples cited included the 2014 California wildfires and cyclones in Hawaii. By land and by sea, we have two reports. First, John Blackstone.”

[clip starts]

BLACKSTONE (voice-over): “Most years, the Dungeness crab harvest in California is bountiful, worth close to $60 million, but this year, there may not be any harvest. High levels of toxic algae in the ocean make the crab too dangerous to eat. The widespread algae bloom is because of unusually high temperatures in the Pacific. Sarah Cohen is a marine biologist at San Francisco State University.”

COHEN: “It’s unbelievably warm. We’ve never had a warming event like this. The extent of it, the different contributing factors, and how this is going to play out this season leads scientists to have huge concerns.”

BLACKSTONE (voice-over): “Extreme heat events are one focus of today’s report on the impact of climate change around the world. The study found that in 2014, extreme heat waves like the one that gripped South Korea were made worse by human-caused climate change, things such as car emissions, burning coal, and methane gas. The report studied 28 extreme weather events around the world last year. 14 of those, including devastating floods in Australia and New Zealand, were found to be made worse, in part, by climate change, but the impact of human activity can be complex, the report says. In the United States, record snowfall in the northeast and Midwest was not the result of climate change, rather just cyclical weather patterns. However, the study says severe wildfires in California are becoming more likely because of global warming.”

COHEN: “Climate change is causing a lot of unfortunate, disastrous impacts around the world.”

[clip ends]

BLACKSTONE: “This is the fourth year scientists have studied whether extreme — human — whether human activity is at least partly to blame for extreme weather things such as droughts and wildfires and over those years, Scott, more than half of the extreme weather events they’ve studied have been linked to human-caused climate change.”

PELLEY: “John Blackstone on a beautiful day by the Bay.”