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The "icebox of America," International Falls, Minn., saw temperatures in the 70s for five days in March, and there were only three days of below-zero temperatures all month. In March, at least 7,775 weather stations across the nation broke daily high temperature records and another 7,517 broke records for night-time heat. Combined, that's more high temperature records broken in one month than ever before, Crouch said. "When you look at what's happened in March this year, it's beyond unbelievable," said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver. NOAA climate scientist Gabriel Vecchi compared the increase in weather extremes to baseball players on steroids: You can't say an individual homer is because of steroids, but they are hit more often and the long-held records for home runs fall. They seem to be falling far more often because of global warming, said NASA top climate scientist James Hansen. In a paper he submitted to the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and posted on a physics research archive, Hansen shows that heat extremes aren't just increasing but happening far more often than scientists thought. What used to be a 1-in-400 hot temperature record is now a 1 in 10 occurrence, essentially 40 times more likely, said Hansen. The warmth in March is an ideal illustration of this, said Hansen, who also has become an activist in fighting fossil fuels. Weaver, who reviewed the Hansen paper and called it "one of the most stunning examples of evidence of global warming." ___ Online: National Climatic Data Center: James Hansen's study on climate extremes: http://bit.ly/HQzxeq
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/
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