More despicable climate hype from Noah Diffenbaugh (press release follows) who is ignoring the obvious: California has had far worse droughts before “global warming” was a glimmer in a scientist’s eye, and these were driven by changes in weather patterns that happened long before CO2 became an issue. For example the worst drought of the past century doesn’t even make the top ten. And as this graph shows, our current California drought is but a blip in the larger historical scheme of things:
UPDATE: WUWT reader Jimbo adds in comments that the models are about a 50/50 split over wetter/drier:
To more directly address the question of whether climate change played a role in the probability of the 2013 event, the team collaborated with scientist Bala Rajaratnam, also of Stanford.
Rajaratnam applied advanced statistical techniques to a large suite of climate model simulations.
It’s called the weather and GIGO. Climate computer simulations are a pile of crap.
Abstract
The Key Role of Heavy Precipitation Events in Climate Model Disagreements of Future Annual Precipitation Changes in California
Climate model simulations disagree on whether future precipitation will increase or decrease over California, which has impeded efforts to anticipate and adapt to human-induced climate change……..Between these conflicting tendencies, 12 projections show drier annual conditions by the 2060s and 13 show wetter. These results are obtained from 16 global general circulation models downscaled with different combinations of dynamical methods…
From NSF: Press Release 14-129
Extreme atmospheric conditions responsible for drought more likely to occur in current global warming
![California_Drought_Dry_Riverbed_NOAA_f[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/california_drought_dry_riverbed_noaa_f1.jpg?quality=83)
The drought crippling California is by some measures the worst in the state’s history.
September 29, 2014
The atmospheric conditions associated with the unprecedented drought in California are very likely linked to human-caused climate change, researchers report.
Climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford University and colleagues used a novel combination of computer simulations and statistical techniques to show that a persistent region of high atmospheric pressure over the Pacific Ocean–one that diverted storms away from California–was much more likely to form in the presence of modern greenhouse gas concentrations.
The result, published today in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, is one of the most comprehensive studies to investigate the link between climate change and California’s ongoing drought.
“Our research finds that extreme atmospheric high pressure in this region–which is strongly linked to unusually low precipitation in California–is much more likely to occur today than prior to the emission of greenhouse gases that began during the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s,” says Diffenbaugh.
The exceptional drought crippling California is by some measures the worst in state history.
Combined with unusually warm temperatures and stagnant air conditions, the lack of precipitation has triggered a dangerous increase in wildfires and incidents of air pollution across the state.
The water shortage could result in direct and indirect agricultural losses of at least $2.2 billion and lead to the loss of more than 17,000 seasonal and part-time jobs in 2014 alone.
Such effects have prompted a drought emergency in the state; the federal government has designated all 58 California counties as natural disaster areas.
“In the face of severe drought, decision-makers are facing tough choices about the allocation of water resources for urban, agricultural and other crucial needs,” says Anjuli Bamzai, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funded the research.
“This study places the current drought in historical perspective and provides valuable scientific information for dealing with this grave situation. ”
Scientists agree that the immediate cause of the drought is a particularly tenacious “blocking ridge” over the northeastern Pacific–popularly known as the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, or “Triple R”–that prevented winter storms from reaching California during the 2013 and 2014 rainy seasons.
Blocking ridges are regions of high atmospheric pressure that disrupt typical wind patterns in the atmosphere.
“Winds respond to the spatial distribution of atmospheric pressure,” says Daniel Swain of Stanford, lead author of the paper.
“We have seen this amazingly persistent region of high pressure over the northeastern Pacific for many months, which has substantially altered atmospheric flow and kept California largely dry.”
The Triple R was exceptional for both its size and longevity.
While it dissipated briefly during the summer months of 2013, it returned by fall 2013 and persisted through much of the winter, California’s wet season.
“At its peak in January 2014, the Triple R extended from the subtropical Pacific between California and Hawaii to the coast of the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska,” says Swain, who coined the term “ridiculously resilient ridge” to highlight the persistent nature of the blocking ridge.
Like a large boulder that has tumbled into a narrow stream, the Triple R diverted the flow of high-speed air currents known as the jet stream far to the north, causing Pacific storms to bypass not only California, but also Oregon and Washington.
As a result, rain and snow that would normally fall on the West Coast were instead re-routed to Alaska and as far north as the Arctic Circle.
An important question for scientists and decision-makers has been whether human-caused climate change has influenced the conditions responsible for California’s drought.
Given the important role of the Triple R, Diffenbaugh and colleagues set out to measure the probability of such extreme ridging events.
The team first assessed the rarity of the Triple R in the context of the 20th century historical record.
Analyzing the period since 1948, for which comprehensive atmospheric data are available, the researchers found that the persistence and intensity of the Triple R in 2013 were unrivaled by any previous event.
To more directly address the question of whether climate change played a role in the probability of the 2013 event, the team collaborated with scientist Bala Rajaratnam, also of Stanford.
Rajaratnam applied advanced statistical techniques to a large suite of climate model simulations.
Using the Triple R as a benchmark, Rajaratnam compared geopotential heights–an atmospheric property related to pressure–between two sets of climate model experiments.
One set mirrored the present climate, in which the atmosphere is growing increasingly warmer due to human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
In the other set of experiments, greenhouse gases were kept at a level similar to those that existed just prior to the Industrial Revolution.
The researchers found that the extreme heights of the Triple R in 2013 were at least three times as likely to occur in the present climate as in the preindustrial climate.
They also found that such extreme values are consistently tied to unusually low precipitation in California, and to the formation of atmospheric ridges over the northeastern Pacific.
“We’ve demonstrated with high statistical confidence that large-scale atmospheric conditions similar to those of the Triple R are far more likely to occur now than in the climate before we emitted large amounts of greenhouse gases,” Rajaratnam says.
“In using these advanced statistical techniques to combine climate observations with model simulations, we’ve been able to better understand the ongoing drought in California,” Diffenbaugh adds.
“This isn’t a projection of 100 years in the future. This is an event that is more extreme than any in the observed record, and our research suggests that global warming is playing a role right now.”
The research was also supported by the National Institutes of Health. Rajaratnam was also supported in part by DARPA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the UPS fund.
-NSF-
I’ve come to call these sorts of studies, ‘video-game science.’
Sitting in front of a computer and trying this scenario and that scenario, seeing what the model does, and then publishing a paper about it, is much easier than doing actual climate physics.
Doing actual climate physics means going outdoors, struggling with instruments, trying to get usable data sets, and all the other gritty realities of doing experimental science and trying to wrest information from nature.
These people aren’t scientists. They’re just video-gamers. And applying statistics to video-game output is a way for statisticians to be just as lazy as the video-gamers. It’s no sweat to get good statistics off computer output; much, much harder to get good correlations from valid data.
Non-predictive models tell you nothing. Combining statistics with non-predictive models tells you more nothing after doing more work.
The fact that these folks don’t realize they’re doing nonsense indicates the intellectual bankruptcy of consensus climate science. Understand this point: these people really believe they’re doing something physically real. It’s not about grant money. It’s about scientific incompetence.
The graduates of PacMan U at work!
Goddard nails it … Shipwrecked By The Laughter Of The Gods … http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/shipwrecked-by-the-laughter-of-the-gods-2/
“One set mirrored the present climate, in which the atmosphere is growing increasingly warmer due to human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.”
Except the atmosphere is NOT warming for quite some time. How did this pass peer review? basing work on things that literally are not happening in physical reality. Telling me warming is in the pipeline all you like it isnt currently doing it, yet this paper is based on this premise? PFFFT NOT SCIENCE.
Some are now even arguing that the past warming along this coast wasn’t even human driven anyway. (this stance has been published and covered here recently)
Since all things can be attributed to manmade CO2 increases, the only way CAGW can die is if there is a protracted period of global cooling – and even that will be attributed to A-CO2. The difference will be that a ban on fossil fuel use will result in a ceasation of global cooling …. for a while, until residual CO2 amounts cause a (semi-temporary) global warming.
The acceptance of computer models and arcane statistical analyses to explain everything is a black mark against our society. Something that is not discernible except to the machinations of computers – I’m saying that without all the adjustments and homogenization and filtering nobody would say that our experiences of weather were outside normal and natural variability. Indeed, we’d say that we should thank our lucky stars the climate isn’t shifting to some earlier, well documented time of cold or megadrought.
Only idealized models and finely crafted statistical analyses can link weather patterns to manmade CO2 emissions. That is what the politicians and general public don’t understand: in its raw form, there is no pattern to blame CO2.
“The acceptance of computer models and arcane statistical analyses to explain everything is a black mark against our society.”
It is specifically a black mark against a government controlled education establishment which insulates captive inmates from exposure to processes of critical thinking — a purpose-built state propaganda program which both Goebbles and Bernays would intensely admire.
We will have to wait and see.
Haaaaaaaaaaa haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Climate comedy fairy tales. Unprecedented my arse. See my references above.
So there you have it. I have hardly started reading and all is garbage in garbage out.
This is called the WEATHER and not the climate. How can these people produce so much bullshit?
Is the Triple -R a certain type of ranch?
The “ridiculously resilient ridge” explained by a “ridiculously resilient fairytale.” 🙂
In the 1966 book “The Computer in Society”, that I first read as a child and still have a copy of, it mentions GIGO, garbage in, garbage out. A lesson still valid to this day.
http://www.amazon.ca/computer-society-Michael-foreword-Marples/dp/B0006BSG54/ref=sr_1_24?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412031389&sr=1-24&keywords=computers+in+society
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
It’s called the weather and GIGO. Climate computer simulations are a pile of crap.
Can I rest my case now?
Yes.
“Climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford University and colleagues used a novel combination of computer simulations and statistical techniques to show…”
Anything their bosses want them to show.
Diffenbaugh and his crew don’t know how to do elementary research. Last February, Investor’s Business Daily wrote an editorial entitled California’s Drought Isn’t Due To Global Warming, But Politics.
In it, the editorial board writes,
California Central Valley Representative and farmer Devin Nunes, was one of three sponsors of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Emergency Water Delivery Act designed to resolve the long-standing problem of environmental water cutbacks to CA’s farmland:
The state “refused to build adequate storage facilities so that rainwater and snowmelt runoff can be stored for use by a growing population during dry years, another element of the earlier system. With no storage, the rain goes wasted.” Valadao explained, “We can’t make it rain, but what we can do is (conserve water) and save it for today, and we did not do that for two years” […] “We went into 2013 with reservoirs 80% full and ended the year at 20% full, and now we have 0%.”
Nunes has the last word:
California’s farmers already pay 1% of the residential price for their water, and get huge federal tax subsidies as well.
Common sense would be to deregulate water and let the market set its price — and profit by finding more of it. Some farming would (and should) move out of California to the plains states, which suffer from flooding a lot more often than droughts. Meanwhile the price of food would increase to reflect the water used in growing it, leading people to consume less of water-intensive foods such as rice.
But above all, we are NOT in a drought. Droughts are by definition abnormal. Anything that happens more years than not is by definition normal. We have enough water, and simply must build enough dams to capture and use it. There is no excuse for not doing so.
Over 95% of the climate models used by the IPCC failed to ‘project’ the temperature standstill. There are lies, damned lies and imagined “statistical confidence”.
But I do hear it’s called global warming. What do the Warmists publish?
It really is much, much worse than I ever dreamed. It is worse than we thought!!!! We are all doomed to little change in drought.
Water abstraction and land use changes have nothing to do with California’s ‘unprecedented’ drought. It’s all co2’s fault and we must act now, as usual.
Just yesterday, they were telling us that drought in the SW United States was caused by La Nina conditions off the Pacific coast. La Ninas are cool conditions, leading to less evaporation of the ocean surface and thus less rain coming in from the coast.
And what have we had for the last several years? La Nina conditions off the Pacific coast, and drought in the SW United States. Sounds like they were right about something. Blind squirrel, nut, etc.
But that causes a problem. At the same time, they were also telling us that ‘global warming’ should be giving us a lot fewer periods of the cool, drought-causing La Nina conditions, and a lot more of the hot, wet El Nino episodes that tend to drench the SW United States with torrential rains. If that’s the case, then you can’t blame the current droughts on the current La Nina and still blame ‘global warming.’ THAT SIMPLY CANNOT STAND! Time to throw out the long accepted wisdom about the link between La Nina and drought, and make up a new story that ties drought to the global warming that is not happening, instead of to the ocean cooling that is.
They’re just making this shit up as they go.
‘Climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford University and colleagues used a novel combination of computer simulations and statistical techniques to show that a persistent region of high atmospheric pressure over the Pacific Ocean–one that diverted storms away from California–was much more likely to form in the presence of modern greenhouse gas concentrations ….’.
===============================================================
This may signal a new approach viz. claiming that the increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration of itself can directly affect the climate, bypassing the atmospheric temperature entirely.
This is getting beyond being a white lie, bald-faced lie, or statistic. This is starting to become the exfoliation-faced guff of Climate Science.
It used to be a lot of fun arguing with these guys, back when actual facts were used, and you’d learn things you didn’t know. More recently there seems to have been a parting of the ways between those who prefer facts,and those who prefer poppycock.
THAT is the gem I keep for when computer simulations come up. It just so happens it concerned California – the land of the frightened and the home of the not so free – as well as Bristlecone pines used by the climate comedienne Mrs. Michael Mann. What more can I say?
Jokes aside, why oh why did this statistical computer simulated garbage ever see the light of day?
CO2 is amazing…it affects the climate without changing the temperature
It causes blizzards and polar vortices. Amazing stuff.
Let them cry global warming drought to their hearts content. Document and keep a list of every scare story and repeat them over and over again. Then when the rains predictably return over California (australia style), and they then try to claim that the floods ate consistent with global warming, rebroadcast these claims ad-infinitum. Although this will be as effective with the faithful as not burning the undead zombies, it may make a few on the fence people take notice.
If California gets more drought they will say the models predicted it.
If California gets less drought they will say the models predicted it.
This is a con job. Don’t fall for it, reach for your back wallet otherwise they will make YOU suffer. I don’t just mean CAGW sceptics, I mean even those who think they are ‘green’, angry and ‘concerned’. Just you wait and see.
“Climate model simulations disagree on whether future precipitation will increase or decrease over California, which has impeded efforts to anticipate and adapt to human-induced climate change”
“12 projections show drier annual conditions by the 2060s and 13 show wetter.”
We are now living in a Twilight Zone episode where the inhabitants of earth are trapped in an endless Saturday Night Live skit. Or in other words we have officially left the age of reason.
As I live in California, I’m extremely happy someone has finally linked the current drought to climate change. I now expect the Gore effect to kick in with a vengeance. Brace for flooding and mud slides this winter!
“someone has finally linked the current drought to climate change”
Could it be that “link” enables Federal money to flow?
Foolish state water policies might not draw much sympathy (or cash).
This is just one of many man made atmospheric heating problems http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/5/2/3
It shows atmospheric hot spots and equatorial boldging
Anthony, it amazes me how much you read into things. Unless I missed it, nowhere in what you posted does it say that the current drought is CAUSED by climate change. It says it is “very likely linked” to climate change. “Linked” can mean a lot of things, like its intensity was made somewhat worse by climate change, or that it’s more likely to happen under higher GHG scenarios (which is what the paper states). For as much as you decry “alarmism,” it sure seems like you are easily alarmed by climate change papers.
REPLY: I read nothing in. The headline which contains the word “cause” can be seen here:
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=132709&org=NSF&from=news
Press Release 14-129
Cause of California drought linked to climate change
-Anthony
Do these scientists (?) think that the climate of California is somehow controlled by different processes to the adjoining Pacific Northwest?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/09/22/surprising-pnas-paper-co2-emissions-not-the-cause-of-u-s-west-coast-warming/
This study appears to be the direct opposition to the above study that is based on empirical evidence. But then what should we expect from models. I really think a coin flip is more accurate.