The temperature in Los Angeles is dangerously hot, Ohio is inundated with flood water and Toronto has only seen 3 normal summer days this June. Welcome to the new weather, and like the new math, it is hard to figure out.

A new United States government report is quite blunt about our weather future.

Stronger storms, more devastating floods, longer lasting droughts are being predicted and when they happen they will more violent and disruptive than we have been previously experienced.

“Heat waves and heavy downpours are very likely to further increase in frequency and intensity,” stated the report from the National Climate Data Center.

“Substantial areas of North America are likely to have more frequent droughts of greater severity. Hurricane wind speeds, rainfall intensity and storm surge levels are likely to increase. The strongest cold season storms are likely to become more frequent, with stronger winds and more extreme wave heights.”

The news doesn’t get any better. Arctic ice will continue to melt and perhaps even disappear during the summer months in the coming decades. North Atlantic and Pacific storms are likely to create stronger winds and extreme wave heights. The perfect storm transformed from fiction to reality.

By the end of the century what we would normally expect as normal rainfall during a 20 year span will be telescoped into 5 years.

Since 1999 the southwest U.S. has been gripped in a severe drought that is threatening the current record book droughts of the 1930s and ‘50s.

“When it rains, it rains harder and when its not raining, its warmer,” said Thomas Carl, Director of the National Climatic Data Center.

There is a trend leading to increased power of hurricanes which might be linked to the rising surface temperatures of sea water.

The report holds back from pointing a finger at global warming generated by human activity by couching the issue under the cover of more studies being required. They do admit that there is a statistical connection between rising sea surfaces and hurricane activity.

Human activity and its impact by generating greenhouse gases can be directly linked to the increase of global temperatures, states the report.

“It’s not getting as cold at night as it did in earlier decades and there are fewer nights without frosts, a trend that expected to continue into the future,” said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The report is specific in its assertion that the global warming experienced in the last 50 years is primarily due to human activity and generation of heat trapping gases.

Photograph Jodice Flickr.com