GUEST POST by Bob Tisdale
That’s the title of a new paper by Cook et al. that’s been making the rounds in the mainstream media.
The paper is available from GISS here. The abstract reads:
In the Southwest and Central Plains of Western North America, climate change is expected to increase drought severity in the coming decades. These regions nevertheless experienced extended Medieval-era droughts that were more persistent than any historical event, providing crucial targets in the paleoclimate record for benchmarking the severity of future drought risks. We use an empirical drought reconstruction and three soil moisture metrics from 17 state-of-the-art general circulation models to show that these models project significantly drier conditions in the later half of the 21st century compared to the 20th century and earlier paleoclimatic intervals. This desiccation is consistent across most of the models and moisture balance variables, indicating a coherent and robust drying response to warming despite the diversity of models and metrics analyzed. Notably, future drought risk will likely exceed even the driest centuries of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (1100–1300 CE) in both moderate (RCP 4.5) and high (RCP 8.5) future emissions scenarios, leading to unprecedented drought conditions during the last millennium.
The paper has two strikes against it right from the get-go: paleoclimatological data and climate models.
A COUPLE OF QUICK SPOT CHECKS
The Cook et al. (2015) paper states, where PDSI stands for Palmer Drought Severity Index:
PDSI is easily calculated from GCMs using variables from the atmosphere portion of the model (for example, precipitation, temperature, and humidity) and can be compared directly to observations.
So let’s take a quick look a couple of worst-case examples of how poorly the models simulated temperature and precipitation in the regions selected by Cook et al during the satellite era, the past 35 years.
They selected a group of 17 models from the CMIP5 archives, using RCP4.5 (moderate emissions scenario) and CP8.5 (“business as usual” scenario). As a spot check, the following two model-data comparisons use the average of all of the models in the CMIP5 archive, with the historic forcings from 1979 to 2005 and the RCP8.5 scenario afterward. If you’d like to redo the following graphs with only the models used by Cook et al., you’re more than welcome to do so. And also show us the outputs of the models that Cook et al. didn’t use.
Cook et al. also identified the coordinates of the regions they included in their study:
All statistics were based on regional PDSI averages over the Central Plains (105°W–92°W, 32°N–46°N) and the Southwest (125°W–105°W, 32°N–41°N).
And their paper included the boreal summer months of June-July-August.
For the data in the following comparisons, we’re presenting GISS Land-Ocean Temperature Index data, and CAMS-OPI precipitation data, which is a merger of rain gauge and satellite-based precipitation data. The data and the climate model outputs are available from the KNMI Climate Explorer.
Again, we’re showing the worst case model-data comparisons.
For the Southwest United States region, the climate models are showing almost twice the observed June-July-August precipitation from 1979 to 2014. See Figure 1.
Figure 1
And in the Central Plains region of the United States, the models more than double the observed warming rate.
Figure 2
CLOSING
My Figure 3 is Figure 1 from Cook et al. (2015). Nice hockey stick.
Figure 3
Maybe at some time in the future, probably not in my lifetime, the climate science community will come to realize that model outputs showing “unprecedented” future values are indications the models are fatally flawed.
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Corruption of science for political reasons is not new, but it is continuing apace…iStudy the science of NAZI Germany. Much of today’s government involvement in everything from food to climate was already hyped in that totalitarian regime. Per the dictionaries, totalitarianism is that form of government where government makes everyone’s decisions, and it looks more and more like the US has finally made it into the ranks…..
Already there. We have the strong, autocratic central government control characteristic of fascism. It is a challenge to find anything man made that doesn’t have some government content.
Desert may suffer drought. That’s a bold prediction.
So the victims of “warm and dry” are going to be forced to move to “cold and wet” in the future. I can sell my house, to one of the victims, at an absurdly high price, due to demand, and retire in comfort to “warm and dry”, with money to spare. Your horror story is my “fairy tale ending”. I was going to fund an IRA, but now I can spend the money, and know that Cook et al., has my back.
Models…
If it is going up, it will always go up infinitely
If it is going down, it will always go down infinitely.
If it is hot outside, we have dry air.
If it has frozen outside, we have dry air.
So predictable.
Oh this infinitely model dumbfug.
The idea of getting at the truth by averaging n models gets me .
To paraphrase Howard Hayden , if it were science , n would be 1 .
What are we supposed to use, Bob? Time travel?
This is what Gates calls science.
This is what mpainter calls “skepticism”.
No, skepticism is an approach to science.
My comment was directed at your trash talk, Gates.
mpainter,
A proper skeptic would wonder how to control for human influences on climate without using paleoclimate data as a baseline. My little quip about time travel was me being nice.
Within its constraints it appears to be a respectable piece of work which says : if the RCP models are correct then the resultant increased temperatures will result in such loss of soil moisture that any changed weather patterns bringing increased cold season precipitation will not be able to compensate.
Fine , but suppose the real world situation does not follow the RCP modelled temperatures .Already in the Great Plains there seems to be a deviation of actual soil conditions from that expected from their models.
It is a solid piece of work which needed to be done to fill a hole in the literature , but it may not be as forewarning as the media hype suggests and hopefully it will not cause the President and all his good men and women to be panicked into emergency measures.
(eye roll) Oh, puh-leeze. Mike Waite, I realize you are running scared (per your comment here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/13/new-paper-unprecedented-21st-century-drought-risk-in-the-american-southwest-and-central-plains/#comment-1859089),
but, “a solid piece of work?” Just how many years’ back taxes do you owe ANYWAY? You have my sympathy.
Here: I’ll add this to save you from eternal self-loathing:
CORRECTION to
Mike Waite at 2:24pm on February 13, 2015:
“… emergency measures. {/sarc}”
#(:))
mikewaite,
We can suppose all sorts of things. One reason for nightmare scenarios is because policy makers want the worst-case supposition which is reasonably supportable. Every risk manager on the planet wants to know how bad it could possibly be, and what’s the least which can be done to reduce their exposure. AGW is no different.
All models are always going to be wrong, or else they wouldn’t be models. NASA itself throws models under the bus: http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2202/
The study suggests that current ice sheet modeling is too simplistic to accurately predict the future contribution of the Greenland ice sheet to sea level rise, and that current models may underestimate ice loss in the near future.
So while you’re supposing benign future because “models are wrong” ask yourself why they must always err on the side of least alarming.
My position is pragmatic. I understand that highly uncertain futures due to huge margins in the estimates are a risk in and of themselves. We know more or less what to expect with the planet in the current temperature regime. Maybe, yes maybe, that’s not the “optimal” temperature for humanity but how would I even go about defining “optimal” operationally? So I don’t look at it that way. I look at it in terms of where our present knowledge is most certain, and that knowledge is in what has transpired in the past leading up to the now.
Gates
What is certain is that droughts will cause less harm with increasing atmospheric CO2. See my comment above. No need to wring your poor hands over this particular alarmist hype.
mpainter,
You’re certain of this? Ok. Cough up the literature which expresses absolute certainty that reduction in water loss via stomatal restriction will happen with no net change in overall metabolism. Across all conceivable drought scenarios which means the VERY worst case must be considered. I’ll also need to know specifics about at what levels of CO2 these beneficial effects can be expected to occur. Do pick a paper which doesn’t use any models in its projections or I shall summarily dismiss it. Thanks.
Well that is Mann did to his one tree ring in Russia.
That was at B Gates re the time travel comment BTW
Someone called “Cook” is the lead author of this paper. Your point is _____________?
@Brandon Gates at 8:57 pm
“Someone called “Cook” is the lead author of this paper. <b<Your point is _____________?”
<b<Your – because it is not clear to whom you refer. Regardless the answer is Benjamin I. Cook, the lead author of the paper. So the point is to cite the lead author of the paper, and there one can find the author’s affiliation, in case, there is need to contact said person. Hope that helps.
Bob T “Maybe at some time in the future, probably not in my lifetime, the climate science community will come to realize that model outputs showing “unprecedented” future values are indications the models are fatally flawed.”
All these “unprecedented” hockey stick model outputs are simply showing that a highly complex, non-linear system of partial differential equations cannot produce a stable numeric output. After a limited time the accumulated rounding errors involved simply drive the output in one direction or the other. Alternatively, or maybe at the same time, unlimited positive feedbacks drive the output out of control
hmmm I only just skimmed this, but Im curious about the datasets on long term SW drought conditions used. I spent a few weeks going over this data a decade or so ago, and at the time there was a CLEAR 150 or so year trend cycling between wetter period and drier ones, with the iceages not warm eras being the extra dry eras. Even found historical references talking about how dry the area had been before the civil war, and as a wetter era was entered it became an easier place to farm and homestead. going by my past understanding whatever was driving those cycles would be expected to take the area affected by the dust bowl era conditions into the bread basket states into its drier era roughly now, give or take a decade or two.
Granted we might simply have more or better data now, but this chart is very different then the past datasets I looked at, so I do wonder.
It could happen…. But that’s not science. After predicting this global warming disaster, then using the same data to predict droughts is a game of guessing and hoping. A major drought could happen. But predicting a drought so far out they run a 50 50 chance of it happening. If it is wetter then the longer the weather (climate) stays like that, the more like hood of a drought. Droughts in the west follow cycles. If we don’t go into a cold era, I predict a drought starting in or around 2038 for the US southwest. I didn’t have to use a super computer for that. I also predict that the next drought in the eastern US will be severe…. more people and no new reservoirs. What the heck, my guesses are at least as good as NASA’s.
So…everyone in California are going to rush to move to Boston to escape the warm weather! HAHAHA.
So something which hasn’t happened yet is already worse than something which was not supposed to have happened (the re-christened MWP) but did happen. And this thing is going to be unprecedented just as soon as we know what it is or if it actually happens.
Of course, if any future drought is half as bad as the searing US droughts of the 1950s and 1930s they’ll find something unique and unprecedented about it. That’s the job of Cook et al.
The only thing I don’t get is this connection between general warming and drought on the global scale. It works for SoCal, but that’s meant to be a semi-desolation. The way to bring drought and famine on much of the planet is to have a major cooling event like that of 2200 BC.
I do not understand the problem any intelligent, well-informed reader has with this artcile.
The author’s position is as as logical as the predictions “Global Warming Will cause more hurricanes” and “Global Warming will cause malaria to increase.” and are consistent with every one of those peer-reviewed IPCC-approved predictions.
Everybody knows Global Warming makes the world hotter. After, the Antarctic continent is getting hotter and melting all of the ice cap even though air temperature is going down, right?
And, the further south you go, the hotter it gets, right?
Go far enough south and you get to Florida, and Florida gets hit by hurricanes. Obviously, the hotter it gets the more hurricanes will occur everywhere else.
But it is even worse than that!
Everybody knows that everything gets hotter the further south you go, right?
And the Sahara Desert is south of Europe, and the American Desert is south of New York City (where everybody know everybody who is anybody lives!) and so …
And the Sahara Desert is very hot, and the Sahara Desert is very dry. So, the hotter the world’s temperature goes, the drier the world will get. And you can’t argue with a peer-review article that appears in print.
But we haven’t gotten to the worst of it all.
The hotter it gets, the further south you go. (Or was that the other way around….Never mind, just infill the data: malaria, yellow fever, insects, rats, mice, plague, etc.)
The further south you go, the more malaria and yellow fever and insects and jungles there are, right?
Look, the example are endless: Everglades, Panama, Amazon, Congo, India … All of these are hot wet .. (well, we will ignore wet because it is going to get drier the more the earth warms) but ALL of these places have more malaria and yellow fever and dengue fever and they kill people ….
So, deaths from disease and dead people will increase because of global warming.
Obviously.
Surely the Cook 2015 paper isn’t actually a peer-reviewed & published paper, right? Can’t be.
Since this paper is so easy to debunk, you’ll surely be submitting a counterargument to the journal, right?
kathleenehrlich
Just as soon as the anonymous people who signed off on the papers as “qualified peer-review” experts are identified. ‘Tis a shame to humiliate only the authors of a paper worth so little. Oh wait! We don’t know who peer-reviews anything, do we?
More seriously, how many papers have you read, how many have you criticized in public? For that matter, how many have you praised in public?
“Just as soon as the anonymous people who signed off on the papers as “qualified peer-review” experts are identified.”
Why is it essential to know who the reviewers are? If the paper has fatal flaws, those can be pointed out to the journal itself.
As if I’m going to stand up at a climate summit conference and criticize CAGW. I did that once, never again. I literally feared for my life. No one listened to what I was saying or allowed me to say it. .
[Sobering. Thank you for your courage in making your presentation there. .mod]
“As if I’m going to stand up at a climate summit conference and criticize CAGW. I did that once, never again. I literally feared for my life. No one listened to what I was saying or allowed me to say it. .”
Who said anything about standing up and speaking at a climate conference? I mentioned writing a letter to the publication raising your issues with the paper.
The counterargument is here. This blog is not controlled by the gatekeepers, too bad for the pseudo scientists, Kathleen. The public is learning the truth.
Climate models over predict surface warming because the land surface models over predict land surface evaporation. Land surface models are known to predict too much evaporation which leads to unrealistically warm temperatures at the surface. Land surface models consist of millions of soil texture parameters that must be estimated from a few thousand observations of streamflow and precipitation (and a few actual measures of soil texture). Given that they are so over-determined, why should we believe them? Land surface models are completely un-validated, unreliable and based on bad science. This paper clap trap, pure and simple.
News Flash: Catastrophic Global Warming Computer Models Predict US Desert Southwest Climate Will Be Warm And Dry
Unprecedented …….statement of the obvious.
Did rising atmospheric CO2 induced droughts drive the Anasazi from their ancestral lands in the desert southwest….. in 1200 AD? Not…….
Frequency of occurrence of Hurricanes may comedown during around 2020 to 2050 and go up by around 2050 to 2080 and comedown by around 2080 to 2110, etc —
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Dr Reddy:
If you could divide the population in India in to groups – averaging of course, but in rough numbers –
How many people in India have a “European-comfortable” (or American-comfortable) lifestyle?
Reliable electric power, insulated house with clean water, heat, air conditioning, sewage hookup to a regional water system that cleans everything before discharging, refrigeration, stove, microwave, entertainment (TV, radio, internet, etc.) and a house or apartment with no people sleeping in common rooms. Stores with food, clothing, services, and extras availble nearby (walking if in a city, or drivable if in the country)) ?
How many have a 1850-1910 European or American lifestyle? No power, no sewage, no running water, no electric services at the house or apartment? No heat or A/C, no luxuries perhaps like a cell phone or internet, and food and shelter and cooking and cleaning available – provided by the poeple working, but still little different from the pre-electricity era over here?
And how many are still in the 3000 BC to 1810 manual-labor, dirt-poor lifestyle?
It is a hard question – If I knew the answer I would not ask. We (in the industrial west) are unique on the world in what we take for granted. But still, how many people in India (and around towards China) need the benefits of cheaper energy?
A good question. In a nutshell I can answer your question: Hyderabad was a heritage city of parks and lakes and now it is a heritage city of pollution and corruption. India as % of the world land area is 2.3%; population in 2011 was 17.31%; water resources are around 4.5%; livestock population is 20%, etc. The people used live hale and healthy prior to 1960 [chemical technology based agriculture] with food-health security but after 60s slowly this was eroded and increased health hazards. This increased the pollution levels [air, water, soil & food] and large part of the income is now going for health care. Governments are spending thousands of crores of rupees [one crore = 10 million] to reduce the pollution in water bodies. All these are the result of poor governance, corrupt officials. For being corrupt, the government raises their salaries by 100% with out going in to modalities as the politicians need their support in elections and amassing wealth through illegal means. Even judiciary joining hands with such political regime.
In fact India is producing the required power but the losses are over-riding. The poor earn and major part invest on alcohol. They never bothered on the type of living.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Yes there apparently WERE “Medieval-era droughts” in the South West, BUT…
A (very) quick look at historic data for these areas. The Chaco Canyon pueblo complex thrived between AD 900 and 1150, an unusually wet period in that area of New Mexico and the South West. That corresponds nicely with the peak of the MWP and Chaco thrived simultaneously with the Norse settlements in Greenland, although it was abandoned earlier than Greenland following several severe and prolonged droughts during the declining temps at the end of the MWP. So at first glance it would appear that the MWP warming produced, if anything, the opposite effect of what this paper claims in at least that area (near ABQ) of the South West. The MWP warming coincided with increased rainfall in the South West, and the cooling at the end of the MWP coincided with drought conditions. Interesting they forgot to mention that… I guess they forgot to tell those state-of-the-art models about it. Those girls are probably anorexic anyway.
That said, the severe drought that triggered the “Great American Dust Bowl” does coincide with the warm period of the 1930’s and the less severe plains drought of the 1950’s also coincides with the mild warm spell in the 1950’s, so that might be taken as confirmation. HOWEVER, (and a big however, at that) our experience here in the plains (I live in South Dakota) since the beginning of the current warm spell and the “pause” has been pretty normal. A few drought years, a few very wet flood level years, and a lot of “normal” years, so the current warm spell does not appear to be associated with any significant drought.
Soooo, based on some real world data, the presumed correlation between warming and plains/Southwest drought conditions is 0 for 1 in prehistoric data and 2 for 3 in modern data. Not exactly a slam dunk for this paper.
[Disclaimer: The data above were compiled from an exhaustive 10 minute scan of the WUWT reference page and Google. The opinions derived from the data are entirely my own, and were paid for by everyone in the USA who recently enjoyed a steak from a steer raised in the currently wet grasslands of South Dakota, home of 800,000 humans and 3 million cattle]
Addendum: After typing the above, I decided that while the first parts are supported by well known historic records and archaeological data, the last part about our experience here in SD was a bit too anecdotal. So I wandered over to NCDC and grabbed their data for a station near here (Platte, SD) for the 10 years from 2004 to 2013 and the 10 years from 1954 to 1963 (50 years prior) then did the same for the closest place to Chaco Canyon with good records, which is Albuquerque, NM. This required an additional 15 minutes of exaustive research and 3 minutes with the calculator on my State-Of-The-Art Linux desktop.
RAINFALL TOTAL 1954-63, ABQ 75.80 —- PLATTE, SD 229.51
RAINFALL TOTAL 2004-13, ABQ 89.97 —– PLATTE, SD 234.06
Perhaps worth noting that the worst drought year in this data set was 1955 in Platte, and 1956 in ABQ while the wettest years were 2010 in Platte and 2006 in ABQ.
As the (self appointed) spokesman for the dry-land farmers in the Great Plains, if this is an AGW drought, may we please have more of it!
http://www.mercurynews.com/portlet/article/html/imageDisplay.jsp?contentItemRelationshipId=5689627
The projections that are made by these models differ in important respects from the predictions that are not made by them. Predictions support fallsifiability of claims and provide information about the outcomes of events. Projections do neither. Thus this paper is scientifically worthless.
[snip. “The “denier” pejorative is not allowed here. ~mod]
And yet “warmist” and “alarmist” are applauded. And you snipped the whole entry, not just the offending word. I eagerly await my imminent banning for disagreeing with the party line.
“Denier” links to the Stormfront lot who hate for no reason people of a Semitic extraction. Unfair.
Warmist has no meaning than ‘warming – ist’. That’s emotionally neutral and philologically equal. Fair.
Alarmist has connotations of calling out “FIRE” inappropriately and so I see how that would be more offensive.
But isn’t that what ‘newsworthy-AGW’ activists are accused of?
Warmist? Sure, why not. And alarmist is fair for those who are genuinely looking to cause alarm, which isn’t by any means true for all those of us who think we have a problem on our hands. However, the insulting “warmista” ,like “denier”, implies a specific political stance (in this case left-wing anticapitalist nutbar) that has nothing to with AGW. I don’t expect to be treated equally – this is your folk’s sandbox after all – but the snip of a whole post just for use of “denier” smacks more of not liking the message in the post rather than the single word. But it is a private blog, so no biggie.
Hey Bob you might be interested if you can get this BBC programme when it comes out – they just started the ads for it but no start date yet – found the trailer on youtube.
Climate Change by Numbers its on BBC4 – the BBC is largely pro-AGW so it should be interesting to watch.
I think this guy is on the programme
http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~norman/
They said the magic words “state-of-the-art computer models”, a rubber chicken dropped down from the ceiling, and they won $100.
Seeing that major cities like Boston, New York and LA already get their water from many miles away all we have to do is expand that system such that all regions are connected via canals, tunnels and aqueducts so that the wet regions can feed the dry regions. Use wind and solar to move the water up hills.
We could prevent floods and droughts with this system. The floods would be prevented by siphoning off the excess from local rivers upstream from towns in flood prone zones.