extreme weather conditions definitely linked to increased greenhouse gases

Last Monday I went down to London to act as legal support for the activists who were involved in the launch of Greenpeace's campaign against VW for their lobbying against the EU legislation for a 30% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020 and also its refusal to meet fuel efficiency targets.  In the same week the press has picked up on the link between extreme weather events and climate change.  There was a good article in the Independent on the 1st July, which you can still read online and in the US, Bill McKibben from 350.org wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal where he points out that it is no longer possible in a country as large as the US to say that extreme weather conditions, which have in the past been regarded as isolated incidents, cannot be linked to climate change.  There have been tornadoes before and there have been floods before, but now these events can categorically be linked.  We can no longer keep calm and carry on he says.  In May this year Glen Scherer in the blog site Common Dreams also links the extreme weather condition in the US to climate change.  As he says no single extreme weather incident can be linked to climate change but extreme weather incidents are coming thick and fast - so thick and fast that finally the media, especially in the US, are waking up to the situation.  In the UK, the Met Office in its usual understatement said 'it is not helpful not to just brush off this question' and a growing number of scientists are getting more aggressive in their arguements, saying that the change in the climate we are already experiencing is more than just increased temperatures and raised levels of greenhouse gases, but changes in the moisture content of the warmer air, leading to more storms in the tropics, more droughts in the subtropics and wetter at higher latitudes and we are already seeing these changes.  It is a wake up call to us all that we cannot sit back and do nothing.  For a start we can put the pressure on VW to step up to the mark and accept that they must, along with other companies, reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 30% by 2020 but we as individuals must also do our bit, both in working for both adaptation and mitigation to climate change, because, like it or not, it is here and will not go away.