Heat waves, droughts, blizzards and the the rest of the year’s U.S. record-breaking extreme weather, likely enjoyed a boost from global warming, suggests a climate report.

Hurricane Irene this year pushed the U.S. yearly record for billion-dollar natural disasters to 10, smashing the 2008 record of nine. In the ‘Current Extreme Weather and Climate Change’ report, released today by the Climate Communication scientific group, leading climate scientists outlined how increasing global atmospheric temperatures and other climate change effects — triggered by industrial emissions of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide and methane — are loading the dice for the sort of extreme weather seen this year.

‘Greenhouse gases are the steroids of weather,’ says climate projection expert Jerry Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, at a briefing held by the report’s expert reviewers. ‘Small increases in temperature set the stage for record breaking extreme temperature events.’ Overall, says the report, higher temperatures tied to global warming, about a one-degree global average temperature rise in the last century, have widely contributed to recent runs of horrible weather:

In 1950, U.S. record breaking hot weather days were as likely as cold ones. By 2000, they were twice as likely, and […]