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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By law, 1/2 the state budget must be spent on “education” so if you can put up with political indoctrination the approved curriculum, there are opportunities there as well. (Though not in the classroom. The money stops in the administration level and goes to contracts to endlessly tear down and rebuild shoddy schools and recycle text books to more politically correct ones.)
Oh Yes. Read This! Fresno Unified created hired a new administrator, THEN froze the budget! This was not filling a vacant post, this was creating a new one! I just spent $30,000 getting my CA teaching credential, and I gotta tell ya, looking for a teaching job… I’m feeling a bit screwed right about now.
>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.
I really do wonder if anyone here has any idea of climate. Water vapour holding capacity of the atmosphere goes up exponentially in temperature. Evaporation goes up linearly. You MUST slow down tropical circulation otherwise the atmospheric boundary layer rains itself dry. A slower tropical circulation MEANS a spin down in the Walker circulation giving a more El Nino like mean state and more Indian Ocean Dipole positive events.
This is exactly what the observations show. The SOI is going increasingly negative and we have seen three IOD events in a row when previous we had never seen two. We have not seen a negative IOD event now since the early 1990s – unprecedented behaviour and driver for the highly unprecedented drought in southern Australia.
The Audubon case I gave above is fairly long and full of legal jargon especially at the top.
The part dealing with the history of water is found if one scrolls down to “1. Background and history of the Mono Lake litigation.”
E.M. Smith, absolutely correct about limiting growth by blocking expansion of water (and other necessary services). When some environmentalists are off the record, that is one subject I have overheard them talk about.
Roger E. Sowell
sonicfrog (05:27:29) : I guess you like high food and produce prices, as nearly 25 % of the U.S. farm output is from California. The place is not the problem here, it’s the people in power.
I’d even go further than that.
The state has a fault line (no, not the earthquake kind) that runs through it politically. There are 2 major urban basins that dominate everything else, and there is everything else. Rural California is just as revolted about the state government and actions as anyone in the rest of ‘fly over’ country would be.
All that is really needed to ‘fix’ California is to eject the SF/Bay area counties and the LA Basin counties from the rest of the state. Split them off into little city/states. Please. Pretty Please!
But it won’t happen. The L.A. water district wants to ‘own’ water all the way to Oregon. SF gets their water from the Sierra Nevada. Nope, not a chance.
Sidebar: SFO and Hetch Hetchy…
There is a valley that was reputed by folks like John Muir to be as full of beauty as Yosemite and just as cherished. That valley is Hetch Hetchy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetch_Hetchy_Valley
It was dammed up so that San Francisco could get cool, clean, mountain snow melt water to drink year round through their own private water system. So, can you guess why S.F. is not interested in water issues? Why everyone else needs to cut back and conserve? And isn’t it interesting that any thought of restoration of Hetch Hetchy is met with an iron fist from San Francisco?
Hypocrisy does not even come close.
So when you can’t get food from the San Joaquin you at least know where to go for a cool glass of mountain water and a nice Espresso …
(Me? I’d tear the dam down in a heartbeat. It was right for the times, but now we can make all the water we want from sea water. I’d rather have a large industrial facility [ somewhere in all the empty industrial spaces in SF… there’s plenty of space that business has abandoned… even a pier or two… ] and a second Yosemite class vacation spot … oh, and all that water going where it ought to have gone, to the central valley river system. I like to fish and sit by the riverbank. And eat. )
My bias? I grew up in farm country in the central valley, but now I’m stuck in the SF Bay area in one of the urban jungle counties that would be in my ‘ejecta’ group… but looking to fix that Real Soon Now…
(For folks not in the computer biz: Real Soon Now is a bit of jargon used by programmers to mean “that thing I told you I would work on, but have done nothing about even though I want to, that will probably be ignored for another year or two, but you’ve asked me about, er, that?, yeah, I’ll get to it /sarcon Real Soon Now /sarcoff This is not meant hurtfully, it is meant as a recognition of the fact that your choices are institutionally driven and you too are drowning in management expedites… )
We might be getting a little of topic with painting the house white, etc., but it is very informative and entertaining. So I will mention Dr Chu to keep it on top.
About 43 years ago my Dad, a homebuilder, built his idea of what a house should be in Connecticut. It is a raised ranch, Rudolph Matern the architect, that has lots of windows and overhangs,built on a hill at about 800ft above sealevel running lengthwise from South to North on a wooded lot with 70 foot tall oaks, ash and maple.He planned it so during the summer the sun would be high in the sky and the trees and overhangs would block out the sun. During the winter the sun would be low in the sky and the sunlight would come into the house and shine on a large brick fireplace, thereby heating the house. By the way, he was “sold”on electric heat, and plumbers that put in furances and heating systems back in the mid 1960’s said electric heat was the way to go even if it was taking away work from them. It was the atomic genie that was supposed to provide cheap abundant and reliable power. But alas, that was before environmentalism, the EPA and three Mile Island. So it was constructed with thermopanes and loads of insulation too.
Now, since Dr Chu has a PhD in Physics and a Nobel prize, I would expect something more from him than painting the roof white. Like plant shade trees too, maybe.
By the way, the house has a almost white roof, Bird Seal King 3 tab shingles, FrostBlende was the color. Reason: Pure white looks cheap, but a near white roof would be cooler in the sun and last longer than a black or dark roof.
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.
I am extraordinarily cheerful, thank you. My point was a small and simple one: it was factually incorrect to say Hansen predicted a super El Nino in 2006, as you did. I am assuming that getting your facts right matters to you as an author. I daresay your pieces go through several drafts before you publish; with some early thoughts being discarded as you decide what to include/exclude or you do your background research (e.g. on coral extinction or temperature series anomaly baselines). If I were to discover a draft of yours and ascribe things in it to you that you never published well that would be less than totally ingenuous, would it not?. Dr Hansen changed his mind on that prediction and never made it in public, to state otherwise is misleading.
As to Hansen’s views on the ENSO, here’s a direct quote.Summary: the Southern Oscillation and increasing GHGs continue to be, respectively, the dominant factors affecting interannual and decadal temperature change. Solar irradiance has a non-negligible effect on global temperature [see, e.g., Reference 7, which empirically estimates a somewhat larger solar cycle effect than that estimated by others who have teased a solar effect out of data with different methods]. Given our expectation of the next El Nino beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance..
Have a good weekend!
I asked this question at Tamino, but nobody answered. Can anybody here help?
******
A question: I was looking at the Multivariate ENSO index at: http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/people/klaus.wolter/MEI/
Looking at the graph, ENSO seems to have been in a predominantly cooling phase until the mid-1970s, then switching to a predominantly warming phase. Am I interpreting that correctly?
If so, could some of the recent warming have been attributed to carbon forcing, when it was actually due to a flip in ENSO? Of course, the flip in ENSO could also be due to global warming, I suppose.
I’d appreciate any advice on interpreting this.
E.M.Smith
According to The World Factbook published by the CIA, if California were an independent state, it would have had the tenth largest economy in the world in 2007.
The 10th largest economy in the world cannot survive on the revenue from a US$1.7 trillion gross product. The last legislative joke-of-a-budget passed by the California legislature had a built-in deficit of US$7 billion, a deficit which is now US$14 billion and on its way to US$40 billion in the near future. Reducing the size of the governmental “White Elephant” is never considered. There is a mandate that spending shall increase and shall never decrease. Maybe California will benefit from the bailout fever now afflicting the ruling class of hope and change and loan California US$14 billion to tide us over until the next budget deficit is legislated. The independent state of California will become a dependent state of the federal government. So goes California, so goes the Nation.
Frank Perdicaro proved himself to be a master of the understatement, when he said “California is poorly managed.”
re: desalinization
For some background info on Tampa’s desal plant and some of the problems encountered. They did not go into detail about the intakes sucking in too much sea grass and clogging them up. But then, they put the plant on the east side of Tampa Bay amongst the sea grass beds and not on the Gulf of Mexico.:
http://www.water-technology.net/projects/tampa/
Some folks insist that the current Australian drought is caused by AGW/CO2. That is silly, and history disproves that assertion.
Droughts in southern Australia are routine and periodic. The last two major droughts began in the late 1930’s, and in 1895: click
Only a few years ago southern Australia rainfall was well above average: click
I didn’t notice any climate modelers saying in 2005 that southern Australia would be in for an AGW-caused 100 year drought this year. But I’m sure someone will dredge up one randomly lucky guess out of thousands of wrong guesses, to ‘prove’ that models work…
…but of course if the models work, tell us what the temperature will be in Cleveland next Tuesday. Give us your predicted high and low temps. Will there be snow, sun, sleet or rain? Maybe an eclipse?
It appears to me that far too many people in the US, including people with PhDs in science, suffer from ADD . . . Arithmetic Deficit Disorder.
sonicfrog (05:52:41) : I’m not sure where this 95 % farm use vs. 5 % residential figure came from.
It’s 5% URBAN, 95% OTHER including farm… We flush a lot out to sea for, er, fish… No way does farming get 95% of the pie. But with Oregon as precedent, when the choice comes down to beef or salmon (pasture irrigation or wash out to the sea) the water is going out to sea…
My point was not that farming gets all the water, it was that cities are not relevant to solving the issue. Frankly, that’s part of why I’d like to see massive desalinization building. If the major urban counties (SF Bay, LA Basin) were from sea water, we would finally be focusing on what is wrong. Expecting average rainfall 90%+ of the time.
We need to be doing San Joaquin ground water recharge 1/2 the time so the other half we can pull out ‘average’ amounts…
But it’s probably an out of date number. I learned it back when we had about 20 something million population (not 37 million) but we didn’t have mandatory flow restricted showers then either …
Another argument for desalination plants instead of what is currently practiced here in Southern California: waste water recycling.
This is not likely to increase real estate prices in Southern California, but….our water powers-that-be are now recycling treated water from the poop-processing-plants (P3). The treated P3 effluent water is allowed to percolate through the soil until it replenishes aquifers, then is drawn out again via wells into the potable water system. The idea is to conserve water by re-use.
The problem is that P3s do not remove some rather serious chemicals and biologically active compounds, some of which are endocrine disruptors. We are talking about synthetic female hormones here, among other baddies. And they are in the public drinking water. The amounts increase year by year as the water is recycled from well to household, unused medicines are flushed down the toilet, processed in the P3, then percolates back into the aquifer.
Perhaps this explains some rather odd behavior by many Californians?
Btw…the Los Angeles Dept of Water and Power drinks bottled water at their meetings…they were horrified when someone (a reporter!) asked why are they not drinking tap water?
At times, So Cal can be rather amusing….I drink and cook with ONLY bottled water.
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California
“No, really. I mean it. Look, pop the cash or we’re gonna wash your windshield.!”
Looks like I’m an amateur attempting banter with professionals.
davidcobb (07:08:08) : This is really silly because the wave regime off the California coast is perfect for wave acuated pumps.
BINGO! Give that man a Cupie Doll! We can power the whole state from a patch of ocean about 1 mile x 100 miles. That power (either directly as you proposed or via electricity) can run all the desalinizers we could ever want. Saudi Arabia uses sea water to grow crops…
We are just being incredibly stupid worshiping at the alter of the god of technophobia.
gary gulrud (07:11:00) : 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.
I’d say it’s a mite more than that (“a layman’s take”). You probably remember ‘the dust bowl’ (by elder proxy). Folks in ‘rural America’ know more about it than folks in urban areas since their lives depend on such knowings.
Guess what: About that time, they fell off a sunspot peak like we are now. (I know, I’m risking setting off a Leif Bomb 😉 They fell off a local peak about 1870-80 and into a dip.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sunspot_Numbers.png
Take a look at the solar / sunspot cycle. There is a periodic drop (serveral, actually). Look at the Maunder, Dalton, etc. Notice that 172-180 years is a strong cycle (Jose) but 1/2 that is too. Notice that 1/2 that cycle we had the dust bowl? We’re now falling from a high point to what is looking ever more like a very low point. Yet, the time series is too short for statistical validity.
IFF there is anything to ‘the sun did it’ as a hypothesis, then I find myself hoping for a ‘Dust Bowl’ event as the best outcome likely. (Avoiding Dalton and Maunder events.) If we are really lucky, the up slope on a line connecting the bottoms of Maunder, Dalton, Dustbowl will just keep on going up and the present ‘dip’ will not be a downturn in a larger cycle…
IFF we are astoundingly luck, there will be no connection at all between sunspots and drought. But that looks like a weak hand given Jevons work on agricultural cycles and sunspots.
A rural layman will be more in touch with what is going on than anyone in a lab somewhere. (Farmers talk about the weather and how it is like / not like 40 or 80 years ago more than anyone I know… Heck my Dad drummed into my head what the dust bowl was like and how they coped.)
I’m just strongly hoping that Charvatova, Fairbridge, Landscheidt, Geoff Sharp (nobwainer) and Vucevik are wrong while all the time the correlations just keep stacking up behind them!
It still bothers me that this is all ‘numerology’ and that there is no mechanism demonstrated ( a couple are proposed ) and I’m still having ‘issues’ with the “astrology and magnets” aspect of some of it; but:
The recent behaviour of the ozone map over the N.pole coupled with the sudden stratospheric warming event sure is starting to look like some kind of external particle / energy / magnetic finger reached into the area and stirred our pot. Vucevik and Geoff seem to be explaining things far better than ‘settled science’ and are blowing the doors off AGW GCM predictions.
Now if the ocean cycles (PDO, ENSO, AMO, etc.) are driven by such solar events, then it all starts to line up. Yes, the ‘random’ ocean currents explain it all; but the randomness is maybe not so random… And that implies that your observations about AMO are maybe going to be ‘spot on’.
Lets just hope that changed farming practices cope better with drought this time.
And yes, I know it’s all rampant speculation and that the best accepted explanation is the semi-chaotic solar standard model along with semi-periodic ocean oscillations. But all new insight starts with a bit of whimsy and speculation; and every oscillator I’ve ever built was subject to excursions from rather minimal external events.
(Fond memories of an old ‘regenerative detector’ tube radio. Touching the insulated nob shifted the frequency by a few kHz. Had to tune it ‘off’ a smidge or leave your hand on the knob for best reception 😉 Kind of a lost art these days…)
Me? I’m doing ‘watchful waiting’. We’ll see what happens and someone will be shown right or wrong. Until then, eyes and mind are open. But I’m not looking to buy farm land in Oklahoma…
(I have bought some grain futures, though. May have to add some water company stocks 😉
Don’t know about California, but around these parts, you paint your roof white and the Homeowner’s Association will swoop down like banshees and slap you with a huge fine for every day you leave it white. They’ll wind up selling your house off and pocketing the cash if you don’t put on a new roof with “approved” shingles.
In Southern Cal. the winter of 1862-1863 probably surpassed 1882-1883. It’s been a long time since I read the article on it but it put down something like 45 inches in a month, Xmas eve till late Jan. So. Cal. was one big lake, it wiped out what was left of the Californio cattle ranches. It was also mentioned in William Brewers excellent ‘Up and Down California.
sonicfrog (12:17:51) : Oh Yes. Read This! Fresno Unified created hired a new administrator, THEN froze the budget! […]
And there, in a nutshell, we have it. No money for paper, pencils or teachers, but they can hire a $148,000.00 a year administrator. Do do what?
“Our first foray into this equity and access work, we have identified hundreds of kids we can fix and help graduate,” he said. “That’s why we need this position.”
To make sure nobody is treated unfairly or has unequal access to a school system that is going out of business..
If we are all equally impoverished, then it’s fairer and that’s betterer…
Re: wave power:
Currently, and for the next week offshore California, waves are forecast at 14-21 feet (average of highest 1/3 of all waves), with individual waves at twice the average. Of course, we are having a significant weather system, too, with gale-force winds. (source: NWS)
There is an awful lot of potential energy in them thar waves…now, getting permission from the various state agencies…oh, never mind…
E.M.Smith, at least NorCal gets to drink fairly pure water from Hetch Hetchy…while we are forced to drink recycled
sewageP3 effluent…can we allege discrimination over this? (I know, I know…I’m a lawyer…I should know this one…)Tom in Florida, re Tampa’s desalination troubles: the same outfit is building the one in Carlsbad. We are hoping they learned some lessons from the Tampa site. I don’t think our ocean water in Carlsbad is warm enough to support grass, but there will likely be other stuff/critters to deal with.
Frank Perdicaro: poorly managed, indeed. Your idea has some merit, except that a 1976 law absolutely prohibits new nuclear power plants anywhere in California. Note the hypocrisy: California has no problem importing vast amounts of power from a triple-header nuke in Arizona, Palo Verde.
In any event, nuclear power has become prohibitively expensive, at $0.25 to $0.30 per kwh, as I noted in my blog.
Roger E. Sowell
gary gulrud (14:28:37) : Looks like I’m an amateur attempting banter with professionals.
Now wait a minute. I’ve been called a lot of things, but rarely ‘professional’. I insist you take that back or buy me a beer! ;=}
(liked your McCabe PDO cite, btw)
Roger Sowell (15:47:09) : at least NorCal gets to drink fairly pure water from Hetch Hetchy…while we are forced to drink recycled sewage P3 effluent…can we allege discrimination over this? (I know, I know…I’m a lawyer…I should know this one…)
Um, only SF, and a few cities that they let have some, gets Hetch Hetchy water. Folks from places they don’t like, get to drink
pond scumbay delta water or, as you pointed out, ‘ground recharge’ …We have ground recharge where I live. I don’t think it has p3 in it, only surface run off… you know, oil, mercury, asbestos, lead, viruses, toxic sprays, … We have a domestic drinking water filter and I’m adding a whole house system with reverse osmosis. Can we be included in your SF suit? 😉
(Sidebar: the mineral from which asbestos comes is common in the hills around here. I’ve sat on a big chunk of the stuff. We also have cinnabar that seasons a local river with mercury (fishing prohibited), that runs into the bay, that people fish in,…)
@ur momisugly Robert Bateman (00:21:40) :
“Maybe if Tweedlee Gore and Tweedlee Chu keep running thier mouths we’ll get enough rain to fill the Reservoirs in the No. State and restore the Glaciers that the Modern Maximum has melted.”
Sadly, it’s only AGW hot air you will hear from these two idiots. Jabba would observe that this AGW position postulated by politicians, and the likes of the shill Al Gore, does not speak well for the state of science education on either side of the pond, in that the majority of individuals do not seem to be able to determine the fallacy of the AGW nonsense, which resolution, let face it, should not be beyond the capabilities of the average high school science student.
>Some folks insist that the current Australian drought is caused by AGW/CO2. That is silly, and history disproves that assertion…
No they do not. BUT it is the hottest drought ever witnessed and the longest and has by far the lowest river flows. Global warming has exacerbated it and the lack of negative IOD events has contributed to a decline in autumn rainfall which is a unique feature of the climate in the region. There are numerous papers in the scientific literature on the warming drying trends in this region.
Meanwhile the southeast Australia – today – is experiencing the most severe February heatwave on record and will quite possible have the hottest day ever recorded. This heatwave has killed hundreds and cost 100s millions in damages. You can keep track of this horrific situation via http://www.abc.net.au/news .
Stick to the northern hemisphere Smokey…
Last year the lakes gained quite a bit…. then the decision was made to do a massive discharge (both Powell and Mead). It seems some fish downstream wanted to wash their teeth real well or something.
They dumped Shasta and Trinity (and possilby Oroville), too. The agency in charge claimed that the decision was made when the Feb. snow pack showed above normal, and that when April rolled around and no more rain/snow had fallen, their hands were tied. Maybe their feet should have been tied also.
Sorry, DJ, you can’t presume to speak for everyone else [“No they do not.”]
Plenty of people blame CO2 for anything and everything.
But if you think that CO2 is not the cause of weather events or climate changes, welcome aboard.
There has been global warming since the last Ice Age, when Chicago was buried under a mile of ice. It is a natural event, and CO2 has nothing measurable to do with it. The very *slight* global warming of the 20th century was entirely natural, as was the recent reversion to the mean.
I feel very bad for our Australian friends, because a drought like they’re experiencing is one of the toughest situations to endure. But it is entirely natural.