City College of SF Fault At A Time That Yesterdays News Is More Applicable Today Not That Thermal Counter Off Movies That Said It's Freezing, GET OUT NOW!! or Ask Mal.

*Manuel G. Bonilla (d.2006 at 85), USGS geologist, discovered and mapped an ancient fault in San Francisco that ran from Cow Palace northwest to the sand dunes of the Richmond district. It was named the City College of SF Fault.

Introduction

The climate is always changing. Natural causes, such as volcano eruptions and variations in solar output, are continuously nudging the radiation balance of the atmosphere, causing it to warm or cool, and the oceans, land surface and cryosphere respond. Since the Industrial Revolution (IPCC, 2007a), perhaps much earlier (Ruddiman, 2003), humans have also been affecting climate by changing the surface of the land and the composition of the atmosphere. The net effect of these changes over the twentieth century has been a warming of the climate (IPCC, 2007a).

Climate change is a change in the statistical properties of weather, usually defined on timescales of three decades or more: not only in the mean (‘what we expect’, coined by science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein in 1973), but the full distribution. Weather hazards lie in the extreme tails of this distribution. As mean global temperature increases, the distribution shifts towards some extreme weather hazards such as heat waves, and if it also changes shape (widens or skews) then the magnitude of these extremes could change more quickly than the mean. So far the picture appears to be mixed, with maximum temperatures changing more quickly than the mean since 1950 in some areas and more slowly in others (Brown et al., 2008). Further increases in global mean temperature are predicted to occur this century (based on inertia in the climate system, inertia in societal change and a range of plausible long-term changes), and several studies have predicted that the intensity of extreme high temperatures and precipitation are likely to increase more rapidly than the mean in many areas (e.g. Beniston et al., 2007; Kharin et al., 2007). Predictions for extreme weather events are summarised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the recent Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters (IPCC, 2012).