Guest essay by Eric Worrall
UCLA thinks that by the end of the century, Climate will reduce the Sierra Nevada snowpack by 85%.
Climate change puts California’s snowpack in jeopardy in future droughts
UCLA research shows how warming trends affect the Sierra Nevada now and in the future
Belinda Waymouth | March 09, 2017
Skiing in July? It could happen this year, but California’s days of bountiful snow are numbered.
After five years of drought and water restrictions, the state is reeling from its wettest winter in two decades. Moisture-laden storms have turned brown hillsides a lush green and state reservoirs are overflowing. There’s so much snow, Mammoth Mountain resort plans to be open for business on Fourth of July weekend.
…
The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which provides 60 percent of the state’s water via a vast network of dams and reservoirs, has already been diminished by human-induced climate change and if emissions levels aren’t reduced, the snowpack could largely disappear during droughts, according to findings in the study published today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
“The cryosphere — frozen parts of the planet — has shown the earliest and largest signs of change,” said UCLA climate scientist Alex Hall, who along with study co-author Neil Berg modeled what future California droughts will look like in terms of snowpack loss. “The Sierra Nevada are the little piece of the cryosphere that sits right here in California.”
During a drought we see less overall precipitation. Adding in warmer air caused by climate change a greater share of precipitation falls as rain, and snow melts more rapidly. So a frozen resource that gradually melts and recharges reservoirs is particularly vulnerable to a warming climate and droughts that are expected to become increasingly severe.
To protect California’s future from the threat of warming temperatures California needs to rapidly reconfigure its water storage systems and management practices.
“I think there are serious questions about the suitability of the current water storage infrastructure as we go forward,” said Hall, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences said.
Besides offering a window into the future, the UCLA study revealed some climate effects that are already happening. Hall and Berg found that the Sierra Nevada snowpack during the 2011 to 2015 drought was 25 percent below what it would have been without human-induced warming. The effect was even worse at elevations below 8,000 feet, where snow decreased by up to 43 percent.
“Seeing a reduction of a quarter of the entire snowpack right now — not 20, 30 or 40 years from now — was really surprising. It was almost as if 2015 was the new 2050 in terms of the impacts we were expecting to see,” said Berg, who is a scientist at RAND Corp.
…
Read more: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/climate-change-puts-california-s-snowpack-under-the-weather
The abstract of the study;
Anthropogenic Warming Impacts on California Snowpack During Drought
Authors Neil Berg, Alex Hall
Accepted manuscript online: 9 March 2017
Sierra Nevada climate and snowpack is simulated during the period of extreme drought from 2011 to 2015 and compared to an identical simulation except for the removal of 20th century anthropogenic warming. Anthropogenic warming reduced average snowpack levels by 25%, with mid-to-low elevations experiencing reductions between 26-43%. In terms of event frequency, return periods associated with anomalies in 4-year April 1 SWE are estimated to have doubled, and possibly quadrupled, due to past warming. We also estimate effects of future anthropogenic warmth on snowpack during a drought similar to that of 2011 – 2015. Further snowpack declines of 60-85% are expected, depending on emissions scenario. The return periods associated with future snowpack levels are estimated to range from millennia to much longer. Therefore, past human emissions of greenhouse gases are already negatively impacting statewide water resources during drought, and much more severe impacts are likely to be inevitable.
Read more (paywalled): http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GL072104/abstract
Climate scientists regularly embarrass themselves with “end of snow” predictions, because they are an inevitable consequence of the “projections” (don’t say predictions) of their runaway climate models.
“End of snow” is one of the funniest and most revealing manifestations of this silliness, though at least some scientists appear to have learned from previous red faces to put the date of their predictions well into the future, presumably so they will never have to answer for their accuracy.
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The only thing that these “Educated” people got right in the whole study was this: “California needs to rapidly reconfigure its water storage systems and management practices.’
Should have done that years ago with a few more dams, stopped worrying about a few small fish and waste good water and a few other idiotic measures they put in place.
California should have installed a minimum of fifty new dams over the last ten years each with 500MW hydroelectric generation facilities. This would have allowed the state to go reliably green and create a sufficient quantity of water storage to supply the states need during the recurring 5 year drought periods
These are the same folks who say no new dams can be built and oh yeah millions of illegals (and their water needs) are welcome.
They’re far to busy spending all the revenue they don’t have on social justice and high speed trains to nowhere to be bothered with little things like dam and reservoir infrastructure, desal plants, and electrical power generation.
My oldest sister’s family lives in Bakersfield and probably doesn’t think of it as “nowhere”. But she certainly has little use for Moonbeam’s new train set.
And this “study” gets published without question. The vapid prognostications are catching up to the warmist crowd.
Wow, 85% reduction to the snowpack in 85 years…how symmetrical!
I actually thought his happened every summer. My bad.
Of course one cold, wet and deep snow winter couldn’t be global cooling or the end of global warming right? 😉
Why am i NOT laughing?!
Because there’s a whole lot of cruelty and tragedy lurking behind the joke. But then, humor IS the bridesmaid of tears.
What will happen if there is more typical snow for the next few years, or even above average?
The hypesters will simply adjust their “predictions” to blame it on CO2 more.
The circular reasoning fallacy in this is that GCMs are proven useless for not only long term predictions, but short term as well.
“Climate change puts California’s snowpack in jeopardy in future droughts”
Yes. As the climate cools, less evaporation means less precipitation. Of course, here in the Sierra, there is no such thing as an average winter. If just bounces between extremes. This year happens to be a good one, relative to the snow pack.
UCLA is certainly fielding new levels regarding graduates stunted ability to think logically. UCLA graduates bring confirmation bias to new depths of a global minimum.
Temperatures at high altitudes are increasing? Assuming that high elevations rise 1°C by 2100; that is what, a 100m-130m increase in elevation to reach the original temperatures?
Researchers without simple common sense who develop models in closed rooms without direct observations or experience at proper elevations.
All guess work = very bad assumptions and models.
Hello!
Is anyone there!?
This is a true “Look into my crystal ball” climate medium scam. The article’s authors delved into the mystical climate powders and irrational assumptions.
I doubt their models could predict tomorrow’s and next week’s weather.
Their predictions are busted already.
Well, no snow during droughts looks like a reasonable prediction. Doesn’t it happen already?
Exactly.
and the pattern is surely going to be one of continued droughts, interrupted by the odd extreme weather event.
A year on year continued snowfall with small variation from year to year is different from one of low snowfall and continued drought interrupted by colossal snowfalls…
you might get the same average over a decade, but it is pretty different.
The California climate has changed, hasn’t it?
No
Climate is an average of weather over 30 years, ie, made up!
To expand on Eric’s reply:
I am a native Californian who has spent nearly all my life here. I first started observing and caring about our weather in about 1957, so call it 60 years ago. In the 70s, there was a climate shift to warmer and more mild (prior to that we had the new little iceage scare). About 2008 we shifted back to the cooler phase of the cycle. Weather now is substantially identical to what it was before the 70s shift.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/14/on-hartmann-and-wendler-2005-the-significance-of-the-1976-pacific-climate-shift-in-the-climatology-of-alaska/
This is an absolutely normal cycle that has a roughly 60 year period, with alternating 30 year 1/2 cycles of warm and cold.
BTW, the worst drought I remember was about 1976 when I learned to downhill ski. Squaw Valley had no snow to speak of at 6200 ft and coming down mountain run from 8200 feet I got to walk over straw patches placed to cover bare spots… That was at the tail of the Ice Age Scare. The lack of ice kind of sunk it. Like now the record snow is sinking the global warming scare.
California has never had “A year on year continued snowfall with small variation from year to year”, that is a fantasy of your creation. When I was a small child, my Dad drove the family to Donner Pass to see the extreme snow. It had not been like that since the Donner Party got stuck in 1846:
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ca-donnerparty.html
So, you see, it has always been like this. Years of nearly no snow. Years of near record snow.
So not only “no”, but “hell no”, and you need to read some history, since clearly you have not lived it or remembered it.
Griff’s version of history is what happens in his Granny’s basement. !!
Nothing else is real to it.
Griff, you should consider moving to London. The climate has four seasons over there: wee hours, midday, evening and night.
Griff, California regional climate always bounces between drought and flood, like Texas, Australia, and many other regions of the world. “Normal” does not equal “small year to year changes”. “Normal” can mean multi decade drought. “Normal” can mean rains that turn California’s central valley into a short term inland sea. Both normal extremes have happened in the past, long before the CO2 obsession.
@AndyG
I don’t even want to think about what happens if Griff’s granny’s basement.
Such clairvoyance would lead ME to play the lottery. Just saying.
Wow griff, considering the massive amounts of energy required to change oceanic-atmospheric teleconnected systems from one regime to another, the relatively small amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that is thought to be from human emissions is magically powerful stuff!!!
To think my daughter and son-in-law graduated from UCLA…hope their education was better than this study. I have lived most of my almost 60 years in California and water/snow has always been feast or famine.
I don’t like to feed the trolls but below is a link to Mammoth Mountains snow history. When you get to the page scroll down to the bottom of the “Daily Message” and click on the down arrow next to the words “Extended Snow History”.
Their history goes back to 1969/1970 and has monthly totals for each year since.
Some of the highlights or low lights. The average for all 48 years including this year is 342.45 inches of snow. There are 26 years below and 22 years above that number. The lowest two year period was 75/76-76/77 and averaged 145.75 and the highest two year period was 2009/2010-2010/2011 and averaged 613.20. The next is ten year averaging and it shows the snow increasing not decreasing.
1969/1970 to 1978/1979 – average of 298.95 inches
1979/1980 to 1988/1989 – average of 334.31 inches
1989/1990 to 1998/1999 – average of 339.87 inches
1999/2000 to 2008/2009 – average of 395.52 inches
2009/2010 to 2016/2017 – average of 386.68 inches
The last 8 years, even in the middle of the drought still showed above average snowfall in Mammoth. My conclusion is that although the past drought was bad (not as bad as 76-77) the problem was made worse by poor water practices, lack of adequate storage and stupid judicial decisions.
https://www.mammothmountain.com/winter/mountain-information/mountain-information/snow-conditions-and-weather
Progreenesjaydubbleyew-liberals are only interested in history when they can find something WRONG to lecture us deplorables about. E.g. Hand-wringing over Huckleberry Finn using the n-word. Context, historical or otherwise, be damned.
Skankhunt42, er, I mean Griff, there is an excellent video by July Talk called, “Picturing Love”. Sounds exactly what you do in an attempt to believe that we are all going to hell because of our amazing quality of life.
Which, for all practical purposes, is migrating CO2 back into the atmosphere after hundreds of millions of years of sequestering. We are SAVING the planet by releasing this CO2 back into the atmosphere.
However in your very feeble, simplistic grey matter, you are of the opinion that all that our species does is damaging to our environment.
You truly sicken me.
Nope. Not in any way that is recognizable to real people in their everyday experience.
There probably will be less snow, but more cold.. certainly hasn’t happened this year where there is more snow than ever.. but this century will be changing to a cold/dry climate after the wet/warm climate of the recent warm cycle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1KYvz7FFrE
Antarctica is the world’s largest desert for a reason.
The End has never been so Nigh.
“Nye” maybe????
I recently looked up Dr. David Viner, he of “children will (sob) grow up not knowing what snow is” ignominy (actually he didn’t say ‘sob’ but I enjoyed inserting it). His career is doing just fine, thank you. He moved on from UEA (University of Easy Access) to lucrative positions with Natural England (Principal Climate Change Specialist) (principal? He has underlings?) and then the British Council (the UK’s “international organization for cultural relations and educational opportunities”) and Dave has now moved on to work for a major consultancy, Mott McDonald. His children are doubtless growing up knowing (snigger) what bread is.
Birds have enough brains to migrate north. Plenty of cryosphere, fresh water, cool air, bitesize protein and living space around. And the best of all, the seafront properties extend perpetually – the otherwise geologically stable land rises faster (recovering from the last ice age) than the sea level is claimed to.
Belinda Waymouth, Neil Berg and Alex Hall in UCLA should aim to outsmart the birds.
If they are so sure about this, and the effect on runoff, they should start building enough large dams to catch and hold the annual water supply. They make no bones about it: it is not going too stop raining, it is going to stop coming down as snow.
Fine. But then start digging. And they might as well put in turbines because it would be a shame to waste all that renewable hydro power.
We are actually paying for these ‘scientists’ to declare “During a drought we see less overall precipitation.”
I feel for these delusional Moche civilisation level climationists. They know they have no proper job, and their failed beliefs are so often laid bare by their gods. Sky still not falling. Glaciers hanging in there. Change looking quite moderate and normal within historical ranges. More Polar bears than ever, etc. So now they cast their climate runes to predict things that cannot manifest themselves in the lifetimes of ordinary mortals, mostly affect rich Californian skiers with money to support them in this case, would have been good news for the Donner Pass wagon train but put snowshoe Thompson out of a job. They are now preserved for future generations in the book of climate models, powered by the very silicon of their Valley, so must be the word of the lord. Or Saint Steve. Amen.
Time for the “First Church of Cimate Science”?
After all, irrational religion is the biggest business in the USA, loads of hard of thought people desperate to believe rather than understand, and a load of snake oil salesman and priests ready to sell them cures for their every anxiety. And what will the climate priests do for money when Trump turns off the subsidy tap to their trough?
Real science? Surely not? They deny basic energy physics, so hard science should not employ any of them without a written denial of their pseudo science models as any sort of fact, supported by a provable peer reviewed paper that applies proven science in a repeatable way. Te absolvo. And don’t call me Shirley.
Those who cannot cope with the impudent “science denial” of independent valldation of their science by experiment may have to leave academe altogether, to get useful honest jobs that add value to society. Perhaps building better infrastructure to protect us from natural climate events, however caused? Cleaning the BS (Bad Science) out of University libraries? Is it now time to flush these false priests of pseudo science themselves out of their privileged jobs and into the gutter where they and their deliberate deceits with their huge, regressive and avoidable economic costs belong? Discuss.
PS It’s so much easier to write opinion than explain science facts to zealots. You can’t fix stupid.
Brian, I do belive that is one of the better comments on this matter that I have ever read!
It is bizarre that the climate hypesters cycle through such memes so frequently. All they did with this prophecy of doom is in effect to learn from the failed UK Met prediction about snow. Instead of talking about how kids of today wouldn’t know what snow is, the authors of this bit of hype pushed the date of doom out far enough that no one will remember how stupid they turn out to be. If they were serious about this work, they would offer an analysis of why not one earlier climate doom prediction has failed and what they have done differently in this new work to make it a meaningful analysis.
….typing on a smart phone is dumb when attempted pre-coffee….”not one climate doom prediction has SUCCEEDED”….. sorry about the editing.
Phil Mote of Oregon State University was the lead author of an article blaming the low snowpack of 2015 in the Pacific Northwest, including northern California, on greenhouse gases. Of course, the strong El Nino was the true culprit, as evidenced by this season’s heavy snowfall.
“The 2015 snowpack season was an extreme year,” Mote said. “But because of the increasing influence of greenhouse gases, years like this may become commonplace over the next few decades.” Impacts of the snow drought in California, Oregon and Washington led the governors of those states to order reductions in water use and saw many ski areas, particularly those in lower elevations, struggle.
http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2016/oct/study-west-coast-record-low-snowpack-2015-influenced-high-temperatures
The fact that this Alarmist garbage could be regarded as science is just sad.
I would suggest that all the so-called experts on GW be assembled with their little theories. Then when shown that observations do not match their “predictions/projections” explain why they were wrong and what do they plan on doing next. My suggestion would be for them to transition to writing rules for board games or something equally useful.
Note to parents paying exorbitant fees and living expenses to educate your children in the US. Stop wasting your money. You can see from works like these that many of our institutions of higher learning have deteriorated into paychecks for idiots schemes. Stick with the local teachers who are focused on teaching the basics. If you have the cash give them a foreign trip as a graduation present. Sending them here is guaranteed to narrow their horizons. Apologies to the few good professors remaining.
test, test, is this thing on
Oregon is chock full O nuts. And they are in control. A very beautiful state though. Maybe they should enjoy all of those natural treasures instead obsessing about them. And no believing in the climate boogey man isn’t the same as conserving the natural environment. It is the opposite of that.
What I think is being used here is the model that results in more [less] El Niño [La Niña] events as a result of increasing atmospheric heating ending up in the equatorial ocean. I remember when the Arctic Oscillation was the darling of AGW scientists because it was trending up, until it began trending down, which resulted in the same string of nonsense.
So let me clarify the current model emerging from Vaunted Ivory Towers (a British comedy waiting to be staged if there ever was one) in the form of a tunable model: Anthropogenic Global Warming will likely cause the [enter name of atmospheric system] to [enter desired direction up or down] leading to [enter more/less] [enter weather pattern desired for greatest effect] which will result in [enter desired catastrophic result to flora and fauna], unless emissions are reduced to [enter the EXACT number here] ppm.
And you are welcome.
This study comes to the correct recommendation – albeit through a misuse of ill- suited climate models.
To meet future water needs, California must have additional water storage capacity – meaning dams and reservoirs. We see thus Spring that in water rich years, they must release they extra water to the sea, they can not save this year’s excess for the future. If they get a hot quick snow melt, they same will happen again — much needed water will be sent to the Pacific.
California has always used the Sierra and other snow pack as water storage, counting on its slow release in the Spring to replace reservoir water as it is used. Snow pack as reservoir works, usually but is not dependably predictable.
California needs to do something pretty impressive….a big percentage increase in storage.
Of course, that’sounds what the study recommends. They didn’the need another study to know that, it’s been a fact for 50 years.
But their record on dam building is not that great. A number of dam failures points to poor site selection and bad engineering.
And it pains Governor Brown immensely that a trickle of river actually reaches the ocean. Actually it doesn’t happen often; what happens is during wet years the water goes to L.A. and during dry years the water goes to L.A. In the 1977 drought Southern Cal flooded their lush lawns and gushed their pretty fountains with impunity while Northern Californians weren’t allowed to flush their toilets or get a glass of water in a restaurant. My Encino relatives never even knew about the emergency waterpipe to Marin and had absolutely no rationing.
And it’s even worse now, with huge expensive tunnels being planned for sucking even more water southward while the existing infrastructure decomposes. And the State of Jefferson is gaining momentum, wonder why.