Reality: It was the result of a natural weather event known as La Niña.
And we pay this man’s salary.
(Houston Chronicle) — Well known climate scientist and activist James Hansen has a new paper on climate science titled, Climate Variability and Climate Change: The New Climate Dice.
In the paper he directly and without equivocation ties the Moscow (2010) and Texas (2011) heat waves to climate change:
Thus there is no need to equivocate about the summer heat waves in Texas in 2011 and Moscow in 2010, which exceeded 3σ — it is nearly certain that they would not have occurred in the absence of global warming. If global warming is not slowed from its current pace, by mid-century 3σ events will be the new norm and 5σ events will be common.
And later, he states:
The most important change of the climate dice is probably the appearance of extreme hot summer anomalies, with mean temperature at least three standard deviations greater than climatology, over about 10% of land area in recent years. These extreme temperatures were practically absent in the period of climatology, covering only a few tenths of one percent of the land area. Therefore we can say with a high degree of confidence that events such as the extreme summer heat in the Moscow region in 2010 and Texas in 2011 were a consequence of global warming.