Wet Years, Dry Years

Steven Mosher December 26, 2019 at 2:38 am

I am always amused at willis

Steven, I assure you, the feeling is mutual. You continue:

“I keep reading all kinds of claims that the slight warming we’ve been experiencing over the last century has already led to an increase in droughts. A few years ago there were a couple of very dry years here in California, and the alarmists were claiming that “global warming” had put us into “permanent drought”

You know there was another guy who had a habit of doing this…. gavin Schmidt. Lucia took him to the woodshed over it.

‘people say” “someone said” its been said… blah blah blah, freshman english 101.
cite your sources. especially if you have a penchant for demanding that your words be quoted.

Now ya’ll will hit google to search and MISS THE POINT. it doesnt matter what “someone” said or ‘what you read”

Like always I am not interested in ‘what people say” or what ‘some alramist said”
you can catch all sorts of people saying dumb stuff.

I heard a skeptic, he said c02 was not a GHG.. therefore.. what?

Steven, I am writing for the educated layman. I expect that they, and you, will have seen lots of claims from scientists like the following:

Summer 2018 saw an unprecedented spate of extreme floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires break out across North America, Europe and Asia. The scenes played out on our television screens and in our social media feeds. This is, as I stated at the time, the face of climate change.

Source? Dr. Michael E. Mann

From 2009:

Although we are still in the early stages of global warming, and again it is difficult to attribute the present droughts entirely to this warming, there are some strong indications that these droughts are indeed not just temporary, but rather may be shifts to a permanently dryer state

Source? Dr. Gavin Schmidt

Nor is this a new phenomenon. Here’s Dr. James Hansen pushing the same story back in 1988:

I see below you advise getting science from the IPCC. From AR4 WG2:

By 2020, between 75 million and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to increased water stress due to climate change. If coupled with increased demand, this will adversely affect livelihoods and exacerbate water-related problems.

Oops …

Then we have politicians, who claim to be following their scientific advisors, saying things like:

Despite winter rains that replenished reservoirs and eased dry conditions in parts of Northern California, Mr. Brown suggested that the drought may never entirely end, and that the state needed to adapt to life with less water.
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“Californians stepped up during this drought and saved more water than ever before,” Mr. Brown said in a statement. “But now we know that drought is becoming a regular occurrence and water conservation must be a part of our everyday life.”

But lets return to scientists. Here’s Dr. Tim Osborne:

There are benefits of CO2 for vegetation growth (though these benefits are often overstated) but these benefits will likely be limited by nutrient shortage and they may be overcome by changes in climate (e.g. increased drought) caused by the same increases in CO2.

Dr. Giorgio Vacciano:

The last two statements are based on literature and common knowledge, but qualify as cherry-picking because they omit most negative effects of CO2 increase and warming (e.g. other clear trends in extreme events, damage to forests and crops by drought and heat waves).

How about the Hadley Center, a bunch of scientists there …

Drought threatening the lives of millions will spread across half the land surface of the Earth in the coming century because of global warming, according to new predictions from Britain’s leading climate scientists.

Extreme drought, in which agriculture is in effect impossible, will affect about a third of the planet, according to the study from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.

It is one of the most dire forecasts so far of the potential effects of rising temperatures around the world – yet it may be an underestimation, the scientists involved said yesterday.

I can find DOZENS of those if you’d like … but as I said, I had expected that people have seen so many of them that they would be aware of what I’m referring to.

You continue:

Me? I wanna know. whats the science say.

https://wg1.ipcc.ch/presentations/Sbsta_drought.pdf

• Drought is a complex phenomenon affected by changes in the hydrological cycle and producing a web of impacts across many sectors and potentially leading to land degradation and forest dieback ;
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• The IPCC AR5 (2013) stressed low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought, owing to lack of direct observations, dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice, as well as difficulties in distinguishing long-term climate change from decadal-scale drought variability ;
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• Recent years have shown substantial methodological developments to monitor and assess drought in a changing climate”

Steven, particularly in the public debate, what the science says is what Dr. Michael Mann and Dr. Gavin Schmidt and Dr. James Hansen and Dr. Tim Osborne and the Hadley Centre have to say. “Science” can’t say anything, and I’m quoting what the scientists say. And as I said above, the IPCC said that climate change would lead to droughts affecting up to 250 million people.

You go on:

Now I dont want to know what the science says because I will just “believe it”
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Nope. Its pretty simple. I wanna see where to start the reading. And check out the bibliography
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california? some people said…. blah blah blah. you can catch dummies saying all sorts of shit
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No need to cite strawfolk when the science says this
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‘California: rainfall deficit linked to natural variability, water stress enhanced by warming trend (Griffin et al, GRL, 2014 ; Williams et al, GRL 2015 ; Diffenbaugh et al, PNAS, 2015 ; Cheng et al.,2016, J Clim) ;
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“• Low confidence in an observed global-scale trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the 1950s, due to lack of direct observations, methodological uncertainties
and choice and geographical inconsistencies in the trends;”
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• High confidence that the frequency and intensity of drought since 1950 have likely increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa (although 1970s Sahel drought dominates the trend) and likely decreased in central North America and northwest Australia ;.
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• Low confidence in attributing changes in drought over global land areas since the mid20th century to human influence owing to observational uncertainties and difficulties in distinguishing decadal-scale variability in drought from long-term trends ;
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• High confidence for droughts during the last millennium of greater magnitude and longer duration than those observed since the beginning of the 20th century in many regions.
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Now ask yourself
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you are in a fight with an alarmist. a knock down drag out tongue war on twiiter
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what do you want to do? Go look at one dataset which tells you a story about 1.5% of the earth?
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or point them at the IPCC and tell them their quarrel is with the science, not you
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this is a handy little trick. Most of the alarmist shit you read ( No ice, no snow, droughts) is actually NOT WHAT THE SCIENCE SHOWS.

If it is NOT WHAT THE SCIENCE SHOWS, Steven, then why are Dr. Mann and Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Hansen and the Hadley Centre scientists saying the exact opposite? YOU are the one with a “handy little trick”. When dozens of prominent scientists are out there whipping up the alarmism, when it’s being repeated in the media as gospel truth, you calmly say “But on page 632 of the IPCC report that nobody reads, it says something a bit more measured …”

So what? You still don’t get it. When the leading SCIENTISTS are making claims, that IS what the science says, because it is what prominent scientists are telling us over and over. Heck, try this one on for size. Here’s Dr. Michael Mann saying we should NOT trust the IPCC reports …

“Many scientists felt that report erred by underplaying the degree of confidence in the linkage between climate change and certain types of severe weather, including heat wave severity, heavy precipitation and drought, and hurricane intensity,

And meanwhile, the IPCC is also saying things like:

• Regional to global-scale projected decreases in soil moisture and increased agricultural drought are likely (medium confidence) in presently dry regions ;.

• Surface drying is likely with high confidence by the end of the 21st century in the RCP8.5 scenario in the Mediterranean, southwest USA and southern African regions, consistent with projected change in Hadley circulation.

and

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C is expected to substantially reduce the probability of extreme drought, precipitation deficits, and risks associated with water availability (i.e., water stress) in some regions (medium confidence). In particular, risks associated with increases in drought frequency and magnitude are projected to be substantially larger at 2°C than at 1.5°C in the Mediterranean region (including southern Europe, northern Africa and the Near East) and southern Africa (medium confidence).

So I fear that you pointing to some obscure few sentences in the IPCC report is NOT what “science says”, to use your term. What science says is, inter alia, what scientists say. And far too many of the leading climate scientists are hyping alarmism about drought.

You finish your comment with:

Find it hard to understand this? If some said, “Christ said X” wouldn’t you just whip the bible?
If a liberal said, “the founding fathers said x” wouldnt you just throw the federalist papers at them?

Next time an alarmist says “The science say there will be no snow”

ask for a citation.

pretty easy.

and if you want to be sarcastic tell them you are doing like Greta said.. listen to the science.
Drought? not so clear what is happening.

Let me go back to the top of the post. What I ACTUALLY said was NOT “the science says” … that’s the voices in your head. “Science” can’t say anything, only scientists can.

What I actually said was:

I keep reading all kinds of claims that the slight warming we’ve been experiencing over the last century has already led to an increase in droughts. A few years ago there were a couple of very dry years here in California, and the alarmists were claiming that “global warming” had put us into “permanent drought”.

And that, my friend, is 100% true, including claims by the most well known and visible climate scientists. Here’s a typical sample of how that plays out in the press, a headline from the Guardian

We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN
Urgent changes needed to cut risk of extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty, says IPCC

Funny … they quote the IPCC just like you. And if you want something more authoritative, here’s the National Geographic take on the question:

Climate change impacts worse than expected, global report warns
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the world is headed for painful problems sooner than expected, as emissions keep rising.
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 7, 2018

The impacts and costs of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) of global warming will be far greater than expected, according to a comprehensive assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released Sunday in Incheon, South Korea.

The past decade has seen an astonishing run of record-breaking storms, forest fires, droughts, coral bleaching, heat waves, and floods around the world with just 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1.0 degrees Celsius) of global warming. [See: Hidden Costs of Climate Change Running Hundreds of Billions a Year] But much of this will get substantially worse with 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, and far worse at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), according to the IPCC’s “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C”, released Sunday and examining more than 6,000 studies.

Damn IPCC keeps cropping up, and NOT in the way that you claim …

It is that kind of misinformed “all kinds of claims” that increases in drought are already happening and “will get substantially worse” I was referring to, and no, you don’t get to pretend that such claims are NOT being both made by and ascribed to scientists and the IPCC.

w.

PS—The journals are not immune to this by any means:

California’s Drought of the Future: A Midcentury Recreation of the Exceptional Conditions of 2012–2017
P. A. Ullrich,corresponding author

Abstract
The California drought of 2012–2016 was a record‐breaking event with extensive social, political, and economic repercussions. The impacts were widespread and exposed the difficulty in preparing for the effects of prolonged dry conditions. Although the lessons from this drought drove important changes to state law and policy, there is little doubt that climate change will only exacerbate future droughts.

Again, I could provide lots of these, but perhaps foolishly I’d assumed that people were aware of these types of claims … although in your case I guess I was wrong.