Guest post by Steven Goddard
On the same day when President Obama and Prime Minister Brown separately warned of imminent economic catastrophe, the new US Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu issued a different catastrophe warning. The LA Times quoted him saying ““I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,” he said. “We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.” And, he added, “I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going” either.”
This is a terrifying warning of drought, coming from a cabinet level official whom the LA Times describes as “not a climate scientist.” And perhaps a little surprising, since it was only two winters ago when the “world’s leading climate scientist” Dr. James Hansen, forecast a “Super El Niño” with severe flooding for California. Dr. Hansen has also warned of a return to wet El Niño conditions during the current year or so.
One of the commonly made claims from the AGW camp is that global warming is causing more El Niño events. Roger Pielke Sr. just did a web log on this topic.
El Niño Impacts: Weaker In The Past, Stronger In The Future?
“What about the future of El Niño? According to NCAR senior scientist Kevin Trenberth, ENSO’s impacts may be enhanced by human-produced climate change. El Niños have been unusually frequent since the mid- 1970s.
El Niño is famous for bringing copious amounts of rain and snow to California. I have spent several El Niño winters in the Bay Area where Dr. Chu lives, including the big one in 1998 when the rain was nearly continuous for months. Living Redwood trees were sliding across Highway 17 in the Santa Cruz mountains. I remember a wonderful weekend in LA in February, 2005 during their second wettest winter on record when they received six inches of rain in three days. It didn’t stop pouring for five seconds the entire weekend. According to NOAA:
(LA 2005) had its 2nd wettest rainfall season since records began in 1877 and the wettest season in 121 years. Over 37 inches of rain (37.25) fell downtown, just failing to reach the record 38.18 inches set during the 1883-1884 rainfall season. Average wet season rainfall for LA is 15.14 inches, making the 2004-2005 season 246% wetter than the 1971-2000 normal.
Snowfall in the Sierras is also normally high during El Niño years. Below is a graph of Lake Tahoe snowfall from 1918-2008 – official data taken from here. Not much of a trend, except to note that the Dust Bowl in the 1930s was dry, as Steinbeck and the Okies observed.
From: this spreadsheet El Niño years bring lots of water to the cities, farms and reservoirs, and allow for periods of high agricultural productivity. So I am not sure what it is that we are supposed to be terrified of – famously dry La Niña years in California, or famously wet El Niño years caused by “global warming?” The official horror story morphs so fast, it is often difficult to keep up. Reading Steinbeck, one might get the impression that dry periods are part of the normal climate cycle in California, rather than a recent invention caused by the burning of fossil fuels. President Roosevelt said at the time – “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.“Heavy rain and snow is forecast for California today.
Perhaps we now have the “Chu Effect” working in concert with the Gore Effect?
From weatherstreet.com
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Off Topic
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/4536352/Flights-could-be-rationed-says-environment-tsar-Lord-Turner.html
California and it’s citizens are completely expendable to the health and well being of the United States, in fact, it would be desirable for it to go away.
Jeez. You run out of gold and they toss you out in the street… um the Pacific?
Rigel, just where were you expecting California to go?
I grew up in Chinalake. For the first 6 years of my life I though all of California was desert.
The only thing I fear from the weather is how crooks and shiftie pols use it to fool the gullible.
I will apologize on behalf of California for sending Bab’s Boxer, and Grandma Pelosi to DC. Even through I never voted for either one.
In the case of our lady Speaker of the House, there is nothing that can be done about it. I feel the same way about SF as Rigel feels about Ca.
Boxer however I can effect a change there. There’s a guy I know from Orange county who wants her job in 2010. His name is Chuck Devore.
If you are tired of climate changers talking about American independance from foreign energy sources, and in the next breath protesting American coal, he’s your man.
If you are tired of enviros complaining about co2 while blocking clean domestic nuclear energy, he’s your man.
If you are filled with dread when you see Barbara Boxer wealding her new energy bill like a club, ready to break it off over your back, Chuck is your man.
Plus he has a blog.
With its roughly 16,000 employees, and a budget that is probably in the billions, the Department of Energy has not, to date, created one electron of energy! Thank you “Jimma” Carter for giving us this waste of money.
And now Steven Chu is using his post to promote his religion.
markm
Decade long droughts are nothing compared to what has happened in the past. There have been several century long droughts in the American West over the last 3000 years. There is a thread at ClimateAudit on this. See “Under Water In The Sierra Nevadas”… the remains of 200+ year old trees under a couple of hundred feet of water.
I hope Dr Chu read this article before he made his remarks. PDO and AMO are major factors affecting US weather and droughts especially PDO along the west coast and AMO along the east coast and sometime they combine in unique ways.
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/12/4136.full.pdf+html
Figure #4 of this article is especially helpful. With PDO now negative and AMO still positive we are today where we were about 1945 -1950. The weather that followed over the next 30 years was cool especially 1965 -1975,when both PDO AND AMO went negative .
Global temperatures seem to go up more than usual when both AMO and PDO are positive like 1995 -2007 and again 1925-1945. Co2 levels have very little to do with these natural climate swings. The climate swings were present well before any manmade CO2 showed any rise.
….SAVE MONO LAKE…….
one gallon jug at a time
Expect more weather events to be blamed on climate change (CC). Last year it was the floods in the midwest (naturally after they occurred). Now, since CA is experiencing low rainfall this winter it becomes a problem due to CC. The only difference now is the hysteria will comes from the US government just as it has overseas.
The good news is, despite this propaganda, it appears more and more people are starting to question CC hysteria. I can only imagine that if we were to have a snowy February in CA that the credibility of Chu would be greatly diminished.
Calfornia that formerly beautiful, wealthy, productive and just plain wonderful state has turned into a basketcase, a lot of it due to their government agencies actions.
As all the alarmists say when a weatherman or physicist state their skeptism to AGW, why should anyone pay attention to Dr Chu. He is only a physicist, not a climatologist.
Years ago, when I was a member of the National Geographic Society, ie I had a subscription. I read an article about California agriculture in the desert and irragation practices. Evidentally a visiting bishop from far away from that region asked the people at the mass to pray for rain. Later on some of the farmers said that was about to worst thing you could pray for because the irragation and the desert conditions were making the growing conditions ideal.
$600 million in the stimulus package for NASA to study climate change? I thought it was a done deal that we are doomed, etc. Should use half that money to study adaptations to climate change and the other half to advance the Singularity. We need it bad.
Nobel Prize winner Al Gore has been predicting that the WAIS will collapse. That will have the dual benefit of making Yuma, Arizona a coastal city and allowing ships to tow huge chunks of freshwater ice to the new coastal regions.
The bad news for Gore is that it will also wipe out almost the entire Democratic voting base, as can be seen in this map:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/results.htm
This is really silly because the wave regime off the California coast is perfect for wave acuated pumps. A Reverse osmosis unit with inlet pressure (1000psi to 1200psi) provided by wave pumps and a pelton turbine on the outlet (700psi to800psi) would be energy positive. Local salinity impacts are easily solved by deep water discharge (cheap plastic pipe run a mile or two offshore to an area of stong current with perferations on the last few hundred feet to spread it out). The only things lacking are the will and the capital.
Google ‘McCabe PDO NOAA’ or something like it to find definitive papers on the PDO-AMO precipitation patterns. The current negative PDO-positive AMO is attended by mild SW drought conditions. When AMO follows, sometime in coming decade(some say imminently) central plains drought will be added.
But then that’s a layman’s take from rural America.
John Philip,
Would it make you happier if I said that “Dr. Hansen seriously contemplated a Super El Nino in 2007 and has already forecast a return to El Nino in 2009?
I’m not sure what your point is, because it seems clear that Dr. Hansen expects El Nino to be the dominant pattern in the future.
rigel
there are some smart ones there this blog is based in ca and i for one would not want the good Mr Watts to go anywhere.
Aussie John (23:50:53) :
So what caused the 1883-1884 wettest ever recorded rainfall season?
There was an intense El Nino event in 1884 (sources: Eguiguren 1894, Sievers 1914).
You can find a table of el nino events at: http://www.cipca.org.pe/cipca/nino/nino/feni%F1o.htm
Aussie John (23:50:53) :
So what caused the 1883-1884 wettest ever recorded rainfall season?
In California? SOI negative numbers indicate La Nino.
ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/home/ncc/www/sco/soi/soiplaintext.html
Steven Goddard
Could you send me your E-mail. I have somthing on seaice that might be of interest to you.
See: Knudsen , Mads Faurschou & Riisager, Peter. Is there a link between Earth’s magnetic field and low-latitude precipitation? Geology 2009;37;71-74 doi:10.1130/G25238A.1
http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/37/1/71
The Solar cycle is already near a record low. Could these factors contribute?
And how do they compare with CO2?
Sorry HasItBeen4YearsYet, but your physics is wrong. White reduces both emission and absorption of radiation, black increases both. So a white house will absorb less energy from the hotter outside in summer, and reduce radiation from the hotter inside in winter. It is perfectly sensible advice.
Winter roof reflects sunlight and house needs more heating. Paint sits on black body interior surface. Black body interior absorbs internal heat and warms the paint. Paint radiates as a black body. Not a good idea to paint the house white unless you live in a hot country.
Re: HasItBeen4YearsYet? (00:24:39) :
I took a look at that video and have extracted a few quotes:
~2:05 “the wealth of a country is proportional to it’s energy use therefore we can’t really reduce our use of energy”
~2:16 Shows graph that shows amount of electricy used per person in various countries on x axis
~2:22 y axis of graph shows standard of living (healthcare, gdp, etc)
~2:37 “Europe which is that cluster over 1/3 of the way over on the left wants to go down by a factor of two the US really has to go down and join them in order to make headroom for developing countries”
At least he admits that we are being forced to reduce our energy use in order to make room for developing countries. I wish he’d admit that we are being also forced to reduce our economy as well. For example, Carol Browner was on Socialist International’s “Commission for a Sustainable Society” that calls for the US to reduce it’s economy and for a global governance. So I would assume that anything she does is going to be owards us using less energy and having a smaller economy.
When this story of Browner’s ties to Socialist International got out, SI removed her information from it’s web page which to me is interesting… And I have yet to find one MSM liberal media source that reported this story.
Dr. Chu is correct in his warning to California. I didn’t read his entire statement so I don’t know if he was insinuating that gorebull warming was the cause. Gorebull warming has nothing to do with it. The article “The Great Droughts of Y1k” May 2001– http://www.yosemite.org/naturenotes/paleodrought1.htm details the past and warns of the future. Dr. Stine also investigates how precipitation in coastal Alaska and southern California are in opposite patterns. That is what is happening today(?) Climate Audit also reviewed this back in 2006– http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=956.
So many layers to sort out: sunspot cycles, DeVries cycles, ENSO cycles, 60 year ocean cycles, climate “Minimum” cycles and volcanic eruptions to muddy up the record. My bet is that they are all interrelated. Dr. Stine is certain that California will have another 150 year drought at some point in time.
I can imagine all sorts of doomsday scenarios that could happen.
Some have happened in the past, such as a comet or meteor crashing into the sea and causing massive tsunamis, death and destruction on a global scale. Shouldn’t we evacuate our coastlines now, before it’s too late? What does the precautionary principle dictate we do?
Shouldn’t we always gauge risk by not only possibly loss but also likeliness? Dr. Chu can’t give any real estimate on the likeliness of this happening, but he wants us to take immediate action based not on probability, or forecasts, or predictions but scenarios.
Does anybody wonder why so many skeptics think this is a hoax or scam? Do Dr. Chu and others like him think they can scare us into blindly accepting their agenda?
Welcome to the return of sound science and public policy!
Radiational cooling? Is there a hole in the CO2 “blanket” in Buffalo?
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Frigid temperatures take WNY by surprise
http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/570235.html
Buffalo State College hosts the national teach-in on Global Warming Situations today — a day the local temperature bottomed out at minus 6 degrees.
“We didn’t have temperatures forecast to be quite that cold,” weather service meteorologist David Zaff said this morning. “When you have snowpack on the ground and clear skies, temperatures can plummet. It’s called radiational cooling.”
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Power Absorption Coefficient and the Beer Lambert Law
http://www.atomicprecision.com/blog/2009/01/06/fwd-power-absorption-coefficient-and-the-beer-lambert-law/
“So carbon dioxide in the far infra red is a low absorber, it has no dipole so the absorption is collision induced (quadrupole induced dipole absorption).”
” Carbon dioxide cannot absorb an infinite amount of radiation,…carbon dioxide has a spectrum. It absorbs only at certain frequencies.”
“Carbon dioxide at atmospheric pressures has essentially no absorption because it has no dipole.”
“The planet will not heat up due to carbon dioxide because I0 / I cannot become infinite in the Beer Lambert Lw. This is a trace gas compared with water, the main gases in the atmosphere are nitrogen (about 80%) and oxygen (about 20%). None of these gases will cause run away heating. They have not done so for 4,000 million years. Obviously, in that time the Earth has developed a self regulatory mechanism. Of far greater danger to the Earth are holes in the ozone layer and pollutants other than carbon dioxide, which is needed by plants, which in turn create oxygen for mammals. Of far greater danger to the Earth i steh ripping apart of the landscape in order to make profit – wind turbines.”
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Absorption of Infra red radiation by CO2
http://www.atomicprecision.com/blog/2009/01/10/fwd-absorption-of-infra-red-radiation-by-co2/
References
1) _http://nov55.com/ntyg.html_ (http://nov55.com/ntyg.html) . 2) _http://brneurosci.org/co2.html_ (http://brneurosci.org/co2.html)
These sites show how CO2 absorbs infra red radiation. At its main peak, CO2 absorbs all infra red in ten metres under atmospheric conditions. There is no radiation left after ten metres. If the CO2 concentration were doubled, all infra red would be absorbed in five metres. This is not a mechanism for change of temperature AT ALL because of convection. The Stefan Boltzmann law for black body radiation was misapplied by Arrhenius because CO2 only has three absorption peaks in the infra red. This means that 94% of the so called “heat producing radiation” escapes carbon dioxide.
So the alarmists have just put temperature proportional to alpha and concentration proportional to intensity. This has little or no science in it. The other site mentioned here shows very clearly that the Beer Lambert law does not produce a temperature change mechanism. The site also discusses gross corruption in contemporary science and society. My Hall of Fame group operated in a time when science was not corrupt and all our work was published in the best peer reviewed journals and books. The AIAS exposes gross corruption in for example cosmology almost every day. we used computers extensively, and we know that use of computers must be carefully controlled. Computer models produced by climatologists are heavily criticised in numerous sites.
So all we are left with is that the weather may be changing.
I suspect nature conspires to make fools of climate and weather prognosticators of all stripes. Hansen predicts super El Nino to wash us away this year and instead we get La Nina that should dry us up. Yet, over the past 24-hours, we’ve been subjected to a longer, harder and more sustained rain in L.A. than I can remember in a very long while. My gutters flowith over! What’s up with that?
In southern Nevada, the roofs of school buses are painted white to reduce the interior heat. Almost anybody who bought a new car bought a “desert friendly” color like white, silver, light blue, etc., etc.
The point is, if you live in a hot, sunny climate, then white helps reduce your energy usage (and reduces local warming). But if you live in a cooler climate, you’ll want your roofs to be a dark color.
I don’t know what us poor fools in the temperate midwest should do. Can somebody develop a roof shingle that turns light and reflective when it’s hot but is dark when cold?
BTW: Shade trees are a wonderful thing. In the summer, the leaves help keep the sun off your home, and therefore cooler. But in the winter, when the leaves are gone, more sunlight strikes your home and this helps reduce your heating bill.