Biblical 40 days and 40 nights rain events forecast to increase.
From the “models are always accurate in climateland for the next 80 years” department comes this claim of “weather, er, climate whiplash”.
According to the study published today, California will zigzag between droughts and floods which will become more intense and more frequent in the coming decades unless global emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases are checked. Study authors point to the fact that California has already experienced a rapid rise in such “whiplash” events – going from a record multi-year drought between 2012 and 2016, to heavy flooding in the winter of 2016-17. Apparently, that’s a sure sign of “whiplash”.
According to the authors, the situation will worsen as the global climate alters due to mankind’s voracious burning of coal, oil, and gas for energy. Gosh.
Their models project that wet-to-dry extremes in California could double under a worst-case scenario in which fossil fuel emissions continue growing until 2100. The researchers projected a 25-percent rise in the frequency of so-called whiplash events for northern California this century, and up to 100 percent in the south of the state.
They mention a disaster on the scale of the 1862 “Great Flood” was likely to occur at least once between now and 2060 and would “probably lead to considerable loss of life and economic damages approaching a trillion dollars,”. Ooof! Sounds like they’ll need more taxes to foot the bill in the future.
The models say multiple such events were “plausible” until 2100. But, the researchers don’t explain how such extreme events could happen in 1862 without the help of “global warming”.
The study:
Increasing precipitation volatility in twenty-first-century California
Daniel L. Swain, Baird Langenbrunner, J. David Neelin & Alex Hall
Abstract
Mediterranean climate regimes are particularly susceptible to rapid shifts between drought and flood—of which, California’s rapid transition from record multi-year dryness between 2012 and 2016 to extreme wetness during the 2016–2017 winter provides a dramatic example. Projected future changes in such dry-to-wet events, however, remain inadequately quantified, which we investigate here using the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble of climate model simulations. Anthropogenic forcing is found to yield large twenty-first-century increases in the frequency of wet extremes, including a more than threefold increase in sub-seasonal events comparable to California’s ‘Great Flood of 1862’. Smaller but statistically robust increases in dry extremes are also apparent. As a consequence, a 25% to 100% increase in extreme dry-to-wet precipitation events is projected, despite only modest changes in mean precipitation. Such hydrological cycle intensification would seriously challenge California’s existing water storage, conveyance and flood control infrastructure.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0140-y
Of course, the study is pay-walled, so unless you fess up or are a member of the climate anointed, you can’t read it. However, I did find the blog of lead author Daniel Swain, and he includes graphs of the model output, such as this one, suggesting 40 day (and presumably nights) rain events will get more common in a nice linear fashion.
Here, Swain talks about the big flood of 1862, but offers no explanation how it happened when CO2 was far less than today.
California’s “Other Big One”: repeat of the Great Flood of 1862
Between December 1861 and January 1862, the nascent state of California experienced a truly extraordinary meteorological event: a more than 40-day long onslaught of extremely moist “atmospheric river” storms that led to widespread inundation on a massive scale. Newspaper reports and personal journals suggest that nearly every river, stream, and creek between central Oregon and the Mexican border experienced significant flooding during this event, which brought dozens of inches of rain even to California’s drier low-lying coastal areas over the course of just a few weeks, and well over 100 inches of rain (over 8 feet) along the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada over a two month period. The Central Valley was transformed into a 25-mile wide, 300-mile long inland sea as deep as 20 feet in some places; newly-elected governor Leland Stanford was transported to his January inauguration at the state capitol via rowboat through the streets of Sacramento shortly before the state legislature made the decision to temporarily relocate to San Francisco. Vast swaths of land in Los Angeles and Orange counties were underwater—land that is now heavily urbanized, and home to millions of Californians. (For those interested, I highly recommend this excellent long read on the 1862 flood event, as well as this earlier piece in Scientific American.)
The U.S. Geological Survey, in a landmark report published in 2011, termed a modern repeat of a similar extreme storm sequence California’s “Other Big One”—an indication that the impact of such an event would be comparable to the enormous damages wrought by a large-magnitude earthquake near San Francisco or Los Angeles. It’s not difficult to see why the “ARkStorm” scenario would be devastating in present-day California: the state is now home to nearly 40 million more people than it was in 1862, nearly a quarter of whom live in floodplains that would be inundated during an event of this magnitude. California today depends on an enormously extensive water storage and distribution system to satisfy agricultural irrigation demands in the Central Valley and urban water needs in its thirsty coastal cities; many of the levees and dams that make up this vast water network also serve as flood control structures that protect urban areas from rising waters during storm events. All of California’s major economic sectors—from Silicon Valley tech to Hollywood movie production to large-scale agriculture—could grind to a virtual standstill in the aftermath of such an event. Overall economic damages could approach a trillion dollars, and thousands of lives would be at risk.
This all may sound pretty implausible, like something out of a disaster movie. But the underlying physical event (a 40+ day sequence of extreme storms) is not a theoretical construct—it definitely happened in 1862. And paleoclimate analysis of sediments from California’s coastal river systems suggests that events of a similar magnitude have happened many times in the region’s deeper past—approximately every 200 years. But how will the odds of such a potentially catastrophic event change as the climate warms?
Our new analysis suggests that the risk of an extreme “sub-seasonal” 40-day precipitation event similar in magnitude to that which caused the 1862 flood will rise substantially as the climate warms. By the end of the 21st century, we find a 300 – 400+ % increase in the relative risk of such an event across the entire state. One specific statistic that my colleagues and I found particularly eyebrow-raising: on our current emissions trajectory, at least one occurrence of an 1862-level precipitation event is more likely than not over the next 40 years (between 2018 and 2060), with multiple occurrences plausible between now and the end of the century. In practical terms, this means that what is today considered to be the “200-year flood”—an event that would overwhelm the vast majority of California’s flood defenses and water infrastructure—will become the “40-50 year flood” in the coming decades.
Then there’s this handy “whiplash graphic”, suitable for making a wall poster to remind you how terrible the future will be in Cali:
More here: http://weatherwest.com/archives/6252
However, the lead author, Swain, has this citation:
- Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
- The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA, USA
So with that sort of eco-background, I can surmise this is just another NGO driven study looking for the next research grant. Based on my experience, and my read of it, I don’t think it has much real science in it, but rather is just another example of PlayStation Climatology™ tweaked to scare the bejesus out of dolts like Moonbeam Governor Brown so he’ll throw money at them.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Whether flood or drought, it’s all caused by evil humans and all bad.
Climate change is man-made always bad. We must repent, pay taxes and join the Borg. Because we are the root of all evil.
The god of Communism failed. The false god of CACA will not be allowed to suffer the same fate.
Note to the authors, Daniel L. Swain, Baird Langenbrunner, J. David Neelin & Alex Hall:
Sharknado is not real.
When did California not “zig zag” between drought and flood?
May 2-3, 1952.
This peer-reviewed piece of s.. science has been published in Nature Climate Change, April 23, 2018, in the category “Research”.
Exactly!
Clear case of using to many Zig Zags on the climate research. It polluted the data.
rimshot
Classic ‘tails you lose , tails I win ‘ for this ‘research allows them to claim any extreme event as proof and any period of no such events as merely time between them and therefore further ‘proof ‘ of their claims .
Does life get any easier than in climate ‘science’ any old rubbish is allowed and you set the game up so you can never lose .
No worries, even if Cali now has a long string of “average” rainfall years, they’ll come up with an intellectual sounding pseudo-science “explanation” for it (i.e., blaming humans for it) and will tell us it’s “bad” and what “catastrophic consequences” it will have on [fill in the blank].
In Australia we call climate whiplash “Summer”.
In Virginia, we call it “weather”.
Weather: “Rain with long fine intervals … suddenly becomes “Climate whiplash” … sheesh,
In Reno, Nevada we were warned when we moved here to be prepared when we left the house to encounter 100 degree (F) weather as well as snow. So far, it hasn’t been that bad. After a 4″ snowfall last June 11, it warmed to only 76 degrees. With humidity in the teens, the ground was dry by 1:00 PM.
So, yeah, we carry t-shirts and coats in the truck year round. And expect whiplash every day.
Anthony,
nice summary commentary on a Nature Conservancy zealot author masquerading as a scientist. Couldn’t agree more. Those dolts are loved by fellow dolts like Moonbeam.
In Orange County, CA where I live there was the 1933 flood that inundated about half of the county. But way back then there were not the flood control infrastructure that is in place today. The big question is whether the current infrastructure is sufficient. At one time Lake Tulare in the Central valley was the largest body of fresh water in the lower 48 west of the Mississippi. Right now it is almost nothing but often Mother Nature has her way. California has always had periods of droughts and floods. There is no real evidence that California’s weather cycles has any thing to do with hypothetical human caused climate change.
That flood struck at the end of the solar minimum between SC16/17.
It was also during a La Nina in the ENSO regions.
This stuff just feeds on itself. And it starts with our government still supporting climate change due to fossil fuels right on their websites. I couldn’t believe it when I saw this today:
https://www.energy.gov/science-innovation/climate-change
We zig-zag in the frickin Twilight Zone.
No need to worry. The globe is cooling right back to the temperature of 1862.
its a pity that these studies continue to use the RCP8.5 pathway, which they ought to know is a fraudulent case, one which assumes oil, gas, and coal resources are nearly endless and stuff the atmosphere with imaginary emissions we know aren’t possible due to simple market forces.
How can they predict the probability of the repeating of an event that has only been recorded once? Magic?
“…a record multi-year drought between 2012 and 2016,”
Are there not studies showing that a 200 year drought occurred as recently as 1000 years ago? Yes, I thought so.
How is it that 4 years is now a ‘record’? The only record I hear is the broken one that keeps repeating, “Catastrophe, click, catastrophe, click, catastrophe, click…”
lol, great catch.
In my country , if the first city has an event its major news and if the same thing happens in any other city its gets a passing mention. California seems to have the same syndrome, they get weather and its a major event/cataclysm. Rest of the US has weather, meh get over it.
‘Anthropogenic forcing is found to yield large twenty-first-century increases in the frequency of wet extremes, including a more than threefold increase in sub-seasonal events comparable to California’s ‘Great Flood of 1862’. ‘
I live close to the Met Office in Exeter and often visit the extensive library and archives there in order to research my own articles.
At the request of another contributor here I looked at the records for a number of other countries, including America.
The US has quite a good if sporadic record of historic events from the late 1700’s. These became much more detailed and consistent from around the 1850’s, when weather observers started sending in records to Govt, that the nascent weather bureau then issued as a monthly and annual ‘US weather review’
There are many gems in these and I would make two observations.
Firstly, that there are numerous records of wet and dry extremes in California (and many other areas) They are not reserved for the modern world, perhaps we just forget our history or, if they are not digitally captured, researchers are not aware of them.
Secondly, the population in California in the mid 19th century was extremely small. Their usage of water was very low and droughts would have had to be very severe for there to have been a problem and any wet events would also have impacted on a tiny number of people and may not even have been noticed, let alone recorded.
There is a rewarding book-perhaps one exists-in which the weather of California is thoroughly researched from the documentation available and it may be that other data can be found in dusty libraries or museums in rural towns.
Extremes and unique drought and wet events in modern day California? I doubt it.
tonyb
This is what I don’t understand about climate doomsayers. There are abundant written journals, diaries, newspapers, paintings, etc from the 1600’s to present in the U.S. and even longer in Europe that can be used to validate some of the research being done. Are climate scientists unable to read or look at art?
Just the fact that California is littered with adobe structures built by the Spanish should tell them something about the climate, i.e. it isn’t normally waterlogged.
Yet another unfalsifiable hypothesis from the Warmists.
California has a mediterranean type climate. Which is more or less another word for “whiplash”.
Not much sign of any unusual peaks in winter rainfall lately, according to NOAA:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/statewide/time-series/4/pcp/3/2/1895-2018?base_prd=true&firstbaseyear=1901&lastbaseyear=2000
FWIW, Los Angeles annual rainfall 1877-2017 is tabulated at http://www.laalmanac.com/weather/we13.php It’s HIGHLY variable. 3.21 inches in 2006-7.. 37.25 inches in 2004-5. IIRC, one year in the 1950s, it got about 7 inches, 6 of which fell in 72 hours, thus presenting many residents with both drought and flood in the same year.
The last semi-bilblical flood was the in winter of 1996/97. It rained for around 30 days almost non stop for the entirety of that duration. This study does not even mention that particular flood, for some odd reason. At the time lakes were starting to form in the valley to the north of Sacramento. Every little rivulet of a stream was a raging torrent.
I also note that there is no mention of the Great Flood of 1964/65. That flood impacted/devastated the West Coast from BC in the north down to north of San Francisco. The Ark Storm of 1861/62 struck 2 years after the maximum of SC 10. It would be interesting to see how the minimum set in on that solar cycle in greater detail. It looks like the minimum started around 1866 which would place the Ark Storm 4 years prior. I wonder if there was another lesser flood winter around 1864/65 of that year. Unfortunately the MEI starts in 1872. So I can’t see what the ENSO regions were doing back in 1861/62. This study is junk, but what else is new for most of the AGW related studies.
It is amazing how whatever the weather is doing, the climate extremists predict that the future will be a worse version of it.
Light winters?
No more snow, as predicted.
Heavy winters?
More cold ahead, as predicted.
Drought?
Endless drought to come.
Heavy rains and floods?
Now it will rain and flood, but really bad.
“Sustainability expert” is a code word for “climate priest”.
Putting a spin on average.
NOW I know why California has such deep arroyos. “Whiplash” and “Zig and Zag”
…more of the same…that they still won’t prepare for
exactly! The rest of the country fixes the problem. CA fixes the blame.
Well said. It is not California’s fault that Oroville Dam was not maintained. It is not California’s fault that there is insufficient water for the residents. It is someone else’s fault.
That was California can spend their tax money on a train. Not particularly fast, nor between two towns that anyone cares about except the residents… maybe. But it will be a monument to Moonbeam, who couldn’t get his satellite back in the ’70s.
Let’s see …hmmm if we double the wet periods and dry periods then, according to my calculations they’ll have Kentucky weather. Salivating more-ons.
I think the use of Zig-Zag papers is causing a distorted perception of reality in many cases.
Possibly a hallucinogenic pipe dream similar to a self induced alternate reality where everything goes up in smoke!
Hahaha! I like that – PlayStation Climatology.