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.
Hansen then closes his paper with a parting shot at Texas Gov. Rick Perry, noting that he called global warming a hoax and asked Texans to pray for rain back in April. Of the unanswered prayers, Hansen writes:
Science cannot disprove the possibility of divine intervention. However, there is a relevant saying that “Heaven helps those who help themselves.”
Science does show that business-as-usual fossil fuel emissions will cause atmospheric CO2 to continue to increase rapidly. The increasing greenhouse gases will cause the rapid global warming of the past three decades to continue, and this warming will cause the climate dice to become more and more loaded with greater and greater extreme events. The probability that this conclusion is wrong is about as close to zero as one can get.
Hansen may well be right about climate loading the dice in terms of increasing the number of extreme heat events. However, attacking the very parties you are trying to convince — in this case, conservative people of faith — is a poor way to bring them around to your cause, and bring about the political action you desire.