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You just have to laugh. In their zeal to make the current drought situation all about their irrational CO2 fears, Bill McKibben’s 350.org tweeted this ridiculous comparison of before and after at California’s Folsom Reservoir, near me. Only problem is, the devil is in the details. See the picture then click to enlarge.
Note the “what a difference a year makes” is actually comparing 2011 and 2014. In 2011, California was reaping the liquid benefits of the 2010 El Niño. In 2014, ENSO switched to the La Niña dry pattern.
Now here is the link to the actual tweet, we’ll see if they disappear it or make a correction.
What a difference a year makes in California. #ConnectTheDots pic.twitter.com/FSRb6EwCSZ
— 350 dot org (@350) June 13, 2014
The real reason for the California drought is ENSO and weather patterns, like this one:
![ENSO_pic[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/enso_pic1.jpg)
Source: NOAA ERH
Furthermore, any dam operators worth a damn draw down during the winter months and then [lets it get] full during the summer months. The draw down is done to have enough room to catch spring snow-melt. The first pic was taken in July. The second pic was taken in January. Most dams similar. Low in January, high in July.
oops. …and then “lets it get” full…
Lakes as well.
Pinecrest California
http://www.calconnect.com › >New Photos
Pinecrest Lake California is located in the Sierra Mountains at an altitude of … The Pinecrest Lake is partially drained each fall to provide room for the spring snow melt. The sloping lake bed turns into a sled run in the winter (but not a very fast … Pinecrest Lake is formed by a dam on the South Fork of the Stanislaus River.
Comparing a wet year to a dry year and January to July. How much more biased can you get? For those interested here is the interactive for the California Reservoirs:
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action
Folsom is there and you can simultaneously plot individual years.
Makes no difference if they tweet a correction. They’ve already had their little climaxes on this piece of eco-porn and are now out on the back-porches smoking their little smokes.
Perhaps Mr. McKibben just needs to learn a bit more about watershed and dam management, along with improving his calendar skills.
2011 was a very wet year in California – one of the top 5 snowpacks on record. That was weather. The last two years have been abnormally dry. That’s climate change.
Everyone knows that!
Rob Dawg, I just checked that site, too. Select 1993-1994, and you’ll see much worse conditions than now. McKibben’s just one big farce.
it looks like that image comparison originally comes from NASA…
http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/news/california-drought-20140225/
REPLY: Right, thanks – but they identified the years correctly in the caption – Anthony
I live in Folsom, and we all received a newsletter a few years ago indicating that Folsom Lake would be maintained at a lower level in the interest of better flood control. The increase in water released was stated as 25%. Major difference.
Perhaps McKibben could find this useful http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/monitor/cal-mon/frames_version.html
1920-2000 warming and increasing precipitation, after 2000 cooling and less precipitation.
Just curious if there is a more recent picture, say from this month. I know it’s been dry, but it would be interesting to see a comparison between January and June, after the spring snow melt (whatever snow there was this year).
And don’t forget that the US Bureau of Reclamation that manages the water released HUGE amounts to ensure that freshwater flows kept ocean saltwater out of the delta area and protect the fish. A giant flush of valuable water that probably could be used right now.
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action
check jan 1, 1993. Almost every reservoir in California was bone dry. So much for global warming.
That there is the difference between 397 and 399 ppm CO2.
Yes, 10 degrees shy of sanity
The entire point of a reservoir is to save up water for dry times (& to hopefully buffer against floods). Good management involves making reasonably good predictions. It would definitely shock me to find out that a california government bureaucracy was rather poor at doing their actual job.
Oh look. Poor predictions. How shocking.
With regard to:
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action
Can anyone explain why the horizontal red bars labelled “Hist Avg” are so much higher than the red “Hist Avg” numerical value given just below the bar?
The other issue with Folsom is that it gets hit the hardest for delta/ecosystem releases. It is the closest to the delta (compared to Oroville and Shasta) and so is first hit for needed salinity and species releases. San Juan Water District started questioning the required releases in August of 2013, but Reclamation couldn’t slow or stop those releases until an “official” drought was proclaimed (the politics of that are another topic all together). In wet or dry years, but especially dry ones, we will continue to see this sort of thing in California, until the USACE changes their flood control rule curves for our major reservoirs, and we enter an era of more dynamic flood control pools. That would allow more carry over year to year. As a Folsom Reservoir water user, I have to admit that January photo was scary, though within about 3 weeks of that photo we had a major rain event in that watershed and the resevoir doubled its storage over a weekend. The joys of California weather.
Never ever forget that reservoir levels in California are 100% man made/controlled. It is not uncommon to see one reservoir experience a huge draw down for maintenance reasons. These datums have no climate component.
So after this El Nino, will they tweet the full one again for 2015?
“Can anyone explain why the horizontal red bars labelled “Hist Avg” are so much higher than the red “Hist Avg” numerical value given just below the bar?”
Percent of average versus percent of capacity. Many facilities are not sized for storage but for flood control.
Someone should respond to them: “what a difference six months makes!!” since it looks like there is three times the water now as there was at the low point in January.
The blue block and bar is today’s actual volume as a percent of total reservoir volume. The red line is the historical average capacity for this date of total reservoir volume. The red numerical value is today’s percentage capacity compared to the historical average for today.
So, eg: total reservoir volume 100, today’s actual volume 60 (blue bar and blue numbers), historical capicity for this date 80 (red horizontal line), percent of historical capacity for this date 75 (red number).
I responded to some of this nonsense from McKibben in an article printed in my local towns newspaper, the Oregonian:
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/06/divestment_is_about_stigmatizi.html
The usual suspects always surface to deflect away from the reason why Dr. Fulks and I even bothered to post comments regarding this article by trying to change the subject. So I’ll state it again. The authors of the above written article, Ms. Adriana Voss-Andreae and Sandy Polishuk are incompetent scientific illiterates. They illustrated this fact by touting the nonsense from Bill McKibben and his organization 350.org.
These two authors cited this drivel from McKibben’s “do the math” video and are completely unaware of the fact that this number by itself is a meaningless figure as I demonstrated below in between the blather from Jim Moran, Tom Civeletti, Vic Blaine and the Holocene kook.
Not only do these incompetent authors not know how to use carbon emission data as they illustrate in their comments from McKibben but also stated that 600 gigatons of CO2 is the highest atmospheric CO2 concentration that we could have in the atmosphere without heating the earth over the threshold of 2 degC that according to these authors will cause catastrophic consequences for life on the earth. So the authors are also unaware that the CURRENT atmospheric CO2 concentration is already far above this fictitious, fraudulent and arbitrarily set value by an entire order of magnitude, as the current atmospheric CO2 is at 3.227 trillion metric tons, which happens to be 5.38 times the concentration claimed to be the threshold for a catastrophe, which they claim is 600 gigatons or 600 billion tons of CO2.
If one examines facts, we see that a 600 gigaton atmospheric CO2 concentration would actually be so low of a value, that plant life would be unsustainable to complete the carbon cycle and sustain life, being at 74 ppmv.
One would also expect that if this was also the correct threshold for a climate catastrophe to occur on earth, it is very, very late in arriving because at the rate of current CO2 emissions, we should have seen a climate disaster begin 163 years ago according to McKibben, these authors and all of their incompetence.
The absurd comments that get entertained and taken seriously from Bill McKibben have completely duped these two authors into their personal and uninformed views that financial divestment away from fossil fuel companies will solve a crisis which, according to their claims, would actually be 163 years past due.
If such actions are taken seriously by an unsuspecting public, you can be sure that I will buy as much of these sold oil stocks as I can get on a bargain as I put my faith on who has the brains and resources to be the first to find alternative energy to fossil fuels being these same companies that these authors claim are hurting the earth. I would also bet on the Koch brother companies being at the fore front of creating energy divergence away from the dependence on fossil fuels. I would certainly not be a blind and clueless believer in investing in undeveloped and unproven “green” energy companies who have already gone bankrupt.
The beliefs of these authors also indicate that they do not understand basic economics. Money flows to those with the best ideas that can be brought to the market place and those are ideas that create a demand. Investors sort through the merits of who has the best chance of success and from there flows the money.
The fact that green technology has to be subsidized by government to survive is a real good barometer that in its current form, it is a lemon, because it cannot attract working capital from those who are willing to take all of the risks.
Chuck Wiese
Meteorologist
350.org seem to have inexplicably missed this story, posted just 3-and-a-half weeks after that photograph was taken :
http://www.kcra.com/news/local-news/news-sacramento/folsom-lake-rises-20-feet-in-4-days/24385276#!YCCgB
Color me shocked…….
McKibben sure is getting sloppy. He doesn’t seem to fact-check at all anymore. Maybe he knows a lot of the “science” he once took such pains to parrot has gone down in flames, and now he is merely going through the motions. Now it is like slapping a gnat to counter his lame arguments, but back in 2006, when he wrote “A Deeper Shade Of Green,” for the National Geographic, you had to go through considerable effort to research his claims, and rebut him.
The good thing about all that research is that, once you have gone through the bother, you have historical ammunition to use later against his yearly doom-and-gloom, end-of-the-world spiel about hurricanes. With that season approaching once again, people can dust off this rebuttal from 2012, which correctly predicted his reaction to Sandy weeks before Sandy happened.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/21/hurricane-warning-mckibben-alert/
I can also note that lake levels such as that can rise pretty quickly if there is enough rain or snowmelt in the respective basin.
Here in Wichita, the main lake that covers the majority of our water supply went all the way from about 30 percent full to overflowing in just a month (after we got a bunch of supersoakers that dumped a net total of 15 inches of rain).
Decreased water demand during the Winter means it is still full today, and any recent loss due to ongoing drought conditions may have been made up after some large rains that have been occurring since memorial day.
That isn’t stopping initiatives to encourage reduced water consumption though, as population growth will otherwise lead our city to find new water supplies simply because the reservoir isn’t big enough to accommodate that growth (and you need to have a very wide lake In this part of the country because most of Kansas is flat).
Compare current Folsom Lake Storage Levels to those of the 1976/77 season. Back then it was certainly worse than we thought.
Sorry, Folsom Lake Storage Levels
Did 350.fools tweet Queensland’s “Unprecedented, “Biblical” Floods” in 2011? Drought or flood it’s our fault.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/01/pictures/110106-australia-flood-drought-water-storms/
When it comes to the El Ninos we must take a deeper perspective.
California’s droughts are truly UNPRECEDENTED and we must act now! Reduce your heat trapping gases. Pfffft.
Here are abstracts showing evidence of US droughts and mega-droughts during the Holocene. Some lasting for decades. It really is precedented unprecedented. It’s always been worse than we dreamed.
SAMPLE
It is a certain fact that droughts have gotten worse since 1950. Man’s influence on the climate is a savage destroyer of the already greening biosphere and more.
Here are the results of drought since we were supposed to have a discernible effect on climate as per IPCC.
It actually gets worse than this.
This is bad news?
Q) Do dam water levels in California ever go down due to INCREASED water usage?
The climate has always been as steady as a rock. It has never changed until we came on the scene. Tell this climate story to your children as a bedtime bonus. Also tell them they will never know what snow is.
I suppose, if they reversed the images around, they could claim it’s evidence of rising sea levels.
Stay in school, just not public school…
Gavin Schmidt has now replaced James Hansen’s post at NASA. He is prepared to reconsider our state of understanding about ‘climate change’.
So where’s the story Anthony ?
Poor old Bill is just missing more fingers and toes than first thought/sarc
The only thing worth knowing about 350 is that it’s 536 in octal.
It was full because of global warming, it is now empty because of climate change.
Dam!
Richard D. Give it a fricken rest. I was raised in a foster home and made it through an Oregon public school system in a county that only had public schools. I attended Oregon State University (Cow U.) which couldn’t dress itself in Ivy even if it wanted to, and Ivy grows like a weed in the Willamette Valley. Out of that public and land grant education I ended up doing a piece of pretty good research that got published in a major journal. I am now an advocate for public education. My students have always done well, given that they had to rise above significant learning disabilities. By God I’ll put my education and the high standards I teach to up against anybody’s here. So take it somewhere else.
That’s why they’re called 350.org. They’re not quite the full circle!
How quickly has science morphed into propaganda. The people behind this would be well aware of the real reasons for the difference in dam levels.
Comparing the dam levels on 2 different times of the year and Nina / Nino is like comparing the Arctic sea ice extent 2013 minimum to the early 2013 maximum. 😉 It’s climatrickery, don’t accept it. No matter how they swing this cat, it’s still called the WEATHER.
Interesting opinion piece in Asian WSJ this weekend by Robert Bryce of Manhattan Institute commenting on Bill McKibben’s statement that we need to cut fossil fuel use by a factor of 20 over next few decades to reduce CO2 levels back to 350ppm. Mr Bryce points out that today we consume on average 1.3 gallons of oil a day,and we would need to reduce that to about 8 fluid ounces – about half what the average Bangladeshi uses today. And to replace that with wind power would only require about 108,000 square miles of land per year to be set aside – nearly the size of Italy.
Bill 350 is proposing a climate march in NY in September. Mr Bryce suggests Bill and his pilgrims should all walk to NY or use solar-powered cars. Or perhaps wind-powered transport? And to set the example they should only use solar or wind-powered phones, only eat raw foods, don’t print any posters, and keep their lights switched off at night.
Since 350.org likes weather events, here are a few from earlier times. We must act then?
“A perspective on the California Drought”
Posted on February 19, 2014
Guest Essay by Kip Hansen
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/19/a-perspective-on-the-california-drought/
Has some of that missing water gone to China? The country whose co2 output is shooting up, while the US’s co2 output has flattened? Where is the outrage?
It’s just the weather and not the climate, as they say.
Then when it floods they still blame man. These people are sick.
Thanks! Let’s see more detail.
We all know they want to send everyone (except themselves of course) back to the pre-industrial era. A time of early death, slavery, rampant diseases and mass suffering. Now that would be worse than we thought!
They have to prove their ideas can work. Since it involves the world we need a pilot scheme in a mid-sized country. Show it works without dams and nuclear.
Dams should never be used for flood mitigation. Because no one knows what is around the corner. That is, unless you have a super computer that controls weather!!
There’s a number of reasons this illustrates their bad science:
– July and January are not comparable. One is post flood/snow pack and one pre.
– Sacramento received above average rainfall in Feb, Mar and April and I think May this year
– Folsom recovered to almost 600K acre feet about 60% full, looking much like the July pic by May this year. Nobody shows that though.
– Folsom is controlled by the Bureau of Reclamation. Releases and level are DECISIONS, not based on water availability. Folsom rose from 162 acre feet to almost 600K, a rise larger than previous droughts. The low of 162 was caused by a BOR DECISION to allow Folsom to drain. The San Juan water district that get’s its water from Folsom for 250K residents above Sacramento, sent a letter in January to BOR saying they had gambled with people’s drinking water and the community’s survival. BOR flushed it all to the Pacific for environmental reasons when they could have picked a different reservoir source. Even in September-December, when no rain fell, BOR drained Folsom at 2000+ CFS. It was a DECISION and you could say the picture was created by them.
That’s the story not told.
Lil’ Fella From Oz
May I say in the most polite and kind way that you are an idiot. Had you been here in the central valley of California in early 1997 you could have experienced the very salvation of state by the dams you so glibly dismiss. Our home furnishing lived on a trailer for two weeks. Ready to be towed to high ground at a moments notice.
The total stream flow into the central valley was above 3 million cubic feet per second at peak flow. Peak flow that can transit out of the valley is about 900,000 cubic feet per second. The difference in flow would have turned the valley into a 400 mile long lake as it did in 1862 (Go look it up). The only player that could make a difference in flooding was the dams…and they did their job.
See http://www.uscid.org/~uscold/ben_9707.html for additional details.
pbh
Even without the El Nino and La Nina, it looks like one photo was taken before the
snow melt and rainy season, the other after. Even if both photos were taken in the
same year, logic dictates that the level would be lower in January than in July.
Pamela Gray says:
June 13, 2014 at 9:40 pm
Richard D. Give it a fricken rest…. Out of [my] public and land grant education I ended up doing a piece of pretty good research that got published in a major journal… By God I’ll put my education and the high standards I teach to up against anybody’s here. So take it somewhere else.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Not sure what’s happening here.
Pamela appears to be saying she received (and is delivering) a good education from/in a public school. Richard referenced the manifest failure of large swaths of public education.
They’re probably both absolutely correct.
Lil fella from Oz is, I believe, firmly placing his tongue in his cheek. Note the silly last sentence, ” That is, unless you have a super computer that controls weather!!”. The full comment is a bit tortured into light-hearted sarcasm against AGW proponent thought but nonetheless I do get a faint tickle in my funny bone. I am not sure how to make suggested improvements to the comment without moving the commenter’s point away from the one he wished to make. Maybe Lil fella can provide a translation for the rest of us challenged in the skill of sarcasm fluency.
“Casino-Capitalism At Greenpeace! “Blows Millions In Donations” In Currency Speculation! “Rocked By Finance Scandal”
http://notrickszone.com/2014/06/16/casino-capitalism-at-greenpeace-blows-millions-from-donations-in-currency-speculation-rocked-by-finance-scandal/
Yeah, uh, this is something you can observe at small river “barriers”, like the one on my hometown that separates the local river into river and canal (the canal leads to a power station.) Every winter, as long as I remember, the water levels were low. The operator often even opened some of the watergates to empty the small reservoir even further, because nobody wanted floods come spring. And when it was spring the water levels would always go back up, because the river would carry the water from snow melting in the mountains.