Several days ago (when it was actually published) I was planning to recommend this post at RealClimate.org, which deals with the implications of record-breaking climatic events. I never got around to it, but over the days since then I’ve accumulated a number of links to compelling news items, each of which has reminded me of the RealClimate post in question. In the order of their publication, here they are:

August 1^st - Global Warming Making Hurricanes Stronger

August 3^rd - Dramatic Collapse of Antarctic Ice Shelf Linked to Global Warming

August 4^th - ‘Strange Things’ Along Pacific Coast Waters

None of these items are necessarily related to Rasmus’ post at RealClimate, but the message to me is that a few randomly distributed out-of-the-ordinary climatic event may be shrugged off as random chance or even a slow trend (as we might see with natural climatic shifts), but thick clusters of climatic oddities indicate rapid change.