Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
As the result of an untimely rush of blood to my head, I posted the first comment on an article at PhysOrg entitled “On this flooded island of homeless people, climate change has never been more real“. Pulling out all the stops to tug at our heartstrings, the article talks about some homeless folks in Sacramento, California who apparently believed the recent drought would last forever. The story was also picked up by the LA Times and other papers. Of course, the LA Times can’t call them “homeless”, that’s not politically correct these days. The term currently used by noble virtue signalers is “unhoused” …
[Lest you think I am without compassion for the homeless, please read my posts “Fixing The Brakes“, “Fixing The EGR“, and “Wandering In Wonderland“. But I digress …]
In any case, here’s the backstory. As a result of thinking the river would never rise again, or perhaps not considering the river at all, a number of the “unhoused” took up residence on a spit of land jutting into the Sacramento river called “Bannon Island”. And of course, 100% predictably, after the last several years of little rain the recent strong rains slowly transformed the spit. First, it turned back into an island, then into a partially-flooded marsh. As the photo above shows, now these unhoused people have to travel to/from their unhouses by raft. Shocking, I know, and obviously a clear sign of “climate change” to the climate ignorati.
My comment was:
When California was dry over the last few years, that drought was blamed on “climate change”, and the people on Bannon Island were high and dry. Mostly high.
Now that we have rainfall again, Bannon Island is partially submerged, and the people on Bannon Island are wet, but likely still high … and that is also blamed on “climate change” …
You guys are a joke. If both wet and dry can be blamed on climate change, then EVERYTHING is the result of climate change. And that’s just nonsensical.
Get a grip. California has had both floods and droughts for untold millennia. And if you live on a low-lying spit of land in a riverbed, you can’t be surprised if the rain may flood your home.
Duh.
w.
Likely somewhat harsh in retrospect, but I don’t care for folks who turn human foolishness and lack of foresight into some kind of bogus climate morality tale.
Amid the usual mud-throwing personal attacks on me that are the typical response of people who have no scientific ammunition, someone said:
It is pretty clear even to high school students: more energy in a system with high contrasts and processes of mixture leads to increased extremes, on either side. You don’t even need earth science for this, of which much can influence the outcome, exacerbate or dampen events.
To which I replied:
While this may be true in theory, recently in fact there has been LESS annual variation in rainfall in Sacramento. Variations in the 1800’s were larger than today. See here for the actual data. (Note there is missing data for a few of the recent years.)
Unfortunately, the PhysOrg website doesn’t allow images in comments. If they had, I’d have posted up this graphic.
Figure 1. Monthly rainfall, Sacramento, CA. Source: KNMI
Of course, this was not convincing to the gentleman, who once again resorted to a personal attack, saying “It is true in practice and you are not a climate scientist.” I had to laugh at that, given that my work has been cited by the IPCC as well as in a Congressional submission to the EPA, and Google Scholar lists ~ 200 citations to my various scientific articles.
However, it did give me an idea about how I could measure “climate extremes”. I decided to take a look at a trailing standard deviation of the Sacramento rainfall data. “Standard deviation” is a measure of the spread of the data. If we’re currently getting more extremes, meaning more wet years and also more dry years, then the standard deviation of the recent data should be greater than that of the earlier years.
A “trailing standard deviation” measures the standard deviation of some number of years previous to a given year. I used a 30-year trailing standard deviation in the graphic below, meaning that each data point in time represents the standard deviation of the 30-year period prior to that time. Why 30 years? Well, calculations over that length of time are generally said to represent the climate rather than the weather. Here’s the result.
Figure 2. 30-year trailing standard deviation of the monthly rainfall in Sacramento, California. Photo shows one of the unhoused inhabitants of Bannon Island considering the vagaries and peccadilloes of the weather.
“Great,” sez I, “done deal!” … however, as has happened more than once, during the night I woke up and thought “Hang on, I left something out!” Grrr … what I’d left out is the fact that as the average rainfall decreases, as has happened in Sacramento, we’d expect the standard deviation to decrease as well. So Figure 1 was not showing what I wanted to investigate.
Of course, that kept me tossing and turning the rest of the night, until I got up early and redid my calculations by expressing them as the 30-year trailing standard deviation divided by the 30-year trailing mean (average) of the values. This removes the effects of the change in the mean over time. Here’s that result.
Figure 3. 30-year trailing standard deviation of the monthly rainfall divided by the 30-year trailing mean (average) of the monthly rainfall, Sacramento, California.
So that was encouraging. The shape of the curve changed, but the conclusion of decreasing extremes was unchanged.
Upon seeing that I had another thought, viz, “Well, maybe I’m missing short-term increases in extremes that are masked by looking at a 30-year time span”. So instead, I looked at 6-year trailing standard deviations divided by 6-year trailing means as shown below.
Figure 4. 6-year trailing standard deviation of the monthly rainfall divided by the 6-year trailing mean of the monthly rainfall, Sacramento, California.
Clearly, despite generally rising temperatures and “more energy in the system”, the variations in rainfall in Sacramento have been getting less extreme, not more extreme … go figure.
At some future date I might take a look at some other datasets … any suggestions regarding what data might be revealing gladly accepted, but no guarantees. Ars longa, vita brevis …
California rain is important to me because I live in a redwood forest about six miles inland from the Pacific Ocean, an hour and a half north of San Francisco … and the rain continues to fall. Supposed to rain every day for the next ten days, looks like a real frog-strangler. No complaints from me, though, it fills the water table so our water well will produce in the upcoming summer.
My best to all, wet or dry, housed or un,
w.
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So much of the claims about “increasing extreme weather” are really about the increasing costs. As Roger Pelke Jr. has demonstrated multiple times, this is mostly due to the increasing value of major infrastructure in areas at risk. When adjusted for GDP disaster costs are holding steady or declining.
What also has to be considered is the cost inflation due to increasing involvement of federal agencies. While it seems attractive to locals to have access to the seemingly infinite federal largess, it comes with an army of bureaucrats to insure every penny is spent the “right” way with the “right” contractors. All of this increases costs and delays.
The 1900 hurricane pretty much destroyed the city of Galveston, killed somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 of its residents and left approximately another 10,000 homeless. This is much worse than any US natural disaster in the years since, especially as Galveston’s population at the time was less than 40,000. The survivors picked themselves up the day after the storm and set to work cleaning up the damage, raising the island by 17 feet and building a seawall. Galveston managed to complete these ambitious engineering projects by 1910 on their own.
See this summary from the Texas Almanac.
Nor in reference to any specific statement, but the media today floored me. They said they hadn’t seen that much rain in the last 80 years. So I, as usual, ask the question “what was special about 80 years ago?” Well, that was the decade after the dust bowl years, in the 1930’s. Yes, it was shortly after the last ‘peak’ warmth of the early 1900’s. Just about where we are right now.
Yes, climate does change, all the time. It is either getting warmer or cooler It just isn’t caused by a trace gas that is vital to life on earth. One part in 2400. Try to find a black grain of sand in 2400 white grains, and ask yourself if that black one could ‘heat’ the rest of them, if you heated it and dropped it into the pile and then ‘well-mixed’ it. See the problem?
It’s amazing. Back in November with the huge snowfall in Buffalo, I was watching news casts from that area (I’m in Iowa) and the news “reporters” were out interviewing locals and they talked to this dude at a gas station, who said, “I’ve lived in Buffalo my entire life and I’ve never seen anything like this…”, blah, blah blah. Apparently he had completely forgotten that almost 8 years to the day, a VERY similar lake effect snow happened.
To be fair, he could have been on vacation and didn’t ‘see’ it, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.
If he hadn’t said it, they wouldn’t have shown the clip.
The nature of “lake effect” snow is also very compartmentalized. Buried in snow here, bare ground just a few miles away.
So it’s quite possible he “never saw anything like it,” by pure chance, even though “IT” has happened to many residents of Buffalo at many times in many different places.
Willis,
Not being a statistics-savvy person, perhaps my comment is dumb, but it’s not intuitively obvious to me that:
“…as the average rainfall decreases, as has happened in Sacramento, we’d expect the standard deviation to decrease as well”
Not that it changes your point, but shouldn’t we test to see if this is true also?
rip
Good question, ripshin. I looked at that. Rainfall is approximately an exponential distribution, in which the standard deviation is approximately equal to the mean. So a decrease in mean is reflected as a distribution in SD.
w.
Nice job Willis, did you look at the distribution? If an exponential then shouldn’t sd/mean be 1? I know other distributions have been used for rainfall so I was wondering about this location.
Like I said, Phil, approximately an exponential distribution. Or a gamma distribution. Or a 3-parameter log-normal distribution. In general, natural phenomena are never exactly a given distribution. And the distribution varies over time.
Not only that, but the distribution varies by geographical location.
In any case, dividing through by the mean removes the issue and allows us to see if the extremes are increasing.
w.
Agreed Willis, appears to be more likely that it’s drying rather than increasing extremes. I remembered that different distributions had been used, I wasn’t sure how the divide by mean would work with the exponential.
Surely using the Average or mean immediately reduces the “extremes”?
Wouldn’t using Max, Min and Range give a better indication?
It amazes me how quickly they forget, and how the “If I didn’t see it, it never happened.” mentality prevails. The current situation brings to mind the “March Miracle” in 1991, in which after seven years of severe drought the skies opened up and it rained for the entire month of March, causing flooding, mudslides (that nearly took out a small town near Felton), flooding of the Salinas River, and the isolation of Salinas, where I lived at the time, due to flooding of all of the roads in and out of town. The good part was that it refilled all of the reservoirs, which the pundits had opined would take years. There was also a similar event sometime in the ’70s. As you stated, California has always experienced such extremes — this is not climate change, but business as usual.
I remember from the 70s the scare stories about the pollution near San Francisco and LA. The smog was so bad in the hot dry summer that it, help, help, would take decades to clear. But all it needed was a proper rainstorm, some serious bucketing down, which the goddess Gaia duly provided.
And, the Christmas/New Years rains of 1963-64 when the Hell Hole dam on the Rubicon river failed and took out all the steel bridges between there and Auburn. I was living in Felton at the time and going to school. It started to rain at the beginning of Christmas break and didn’t stop for at least two weeks. I had to do all my field collecting for my petrology collection in the rain.
You shouldn’t be amazed, it’s natural.
We have evolved to perceive the present as worse than the past and the future as full of threats. It’s a survival instinct probably handed down to us by our early ancestors in the African Savannah whose survival depended on clearing their minds of past events and concentrating on immediate threats.
The result is that we have poor recall of earlier extreme events and instinctively tend to see current ones as unprecedented, indicating threats in the future.
This also leads us to viewing the past with unwarranted rosy retrospection. the Romans had a phrase for it – “The past is always well remembered”.
its the same kindergarten science that says … “the world is warming so the polar ice MUST be melting” … ignoring the Poles “may be” warming up from -20 to -19.5 …
We Westerners live in a post-literate, post-technical society. By this I mean that the average citizen no longer has the capacity to read or understand what he is reading in general and understand technical material in particular. This is all strange considering we are the most educated, technologically based and (user) savvy in the history of our species.
I say this with conviction from experience: you cannot change a perception or opinion strongly held with data, facts, observations of contradictions or physical impossibility.
All you have to do to see this is consider how the NYT praises Ehrlich for his predictions and ignores Biden’ easily refuted claims of personal valor and exceptionalism. Facts don’t make the case.
The wisest person here is actually AOC: she said (paraphrase) that sometimes [always] we pay more attention to facts than to the truth. And she remains important and popular.
So your critic sees your graphs. Sure. And then he walks away with the same opinion except now also one that you are a selfish jerk who nobody should pay any attention to.
I had friends, some relatives, who dropped away once I pointed out inconsistencies in their alarmist claims. They would not counter my points. One just said she paid attention only to “trustworthy sources”. She refused to think critically for herself, question, despite being the most educated and world experienced of all of us.
We live in a post-individual “Bubble” society. The Bubble receives information from the authoritative Outside that can’t be refuted …. seriously, can’t be, because the evidence for refutation exists outside the Bubble membrane.
Good luck, Willis.
I know we have to keep bashing away or the insanity will just roll over us as it has through terrible times in other countries for more than a century. But, still, good luck.
A longer way of saying that you can’t counter a deeply held belief, no matter how untrue, with mere facts.
Do we live in a post-literate “bubble” society?
That’s a serious question, beyond the individual psychological problem of feelings prevailing over facts. If so, our battles for common sense publuc management cannot be fought except through systems that replace a bad bubble with a good bubble, not breach it.
That would be alarming. But possibly true?
Obviously, she did not consider you a trustworthy source.
Yeah. I get that. When I pointed out what I have seen in the mountains that refutes the climate-stability hoax of the alarmists, she refuses to discuss it. I think “trustworthy sources” means Dad in some childish manner, that authority figure who tells you he’s smarter, more experienced than you, and will make sure nothing bad happens to you, you can rely on Dad.
What I was asking was for her to consider an opinion/thought/question that came from a conservative online publication or two. She wouldn’t even read the piece to see what the question/point was. You don’t even want to if you rely on Dad. Dad – like the NYT or Xi – gives you comfort only if you decide he’s perfect.
When someone refuses to consider anything that might disprove their beliefs, I think one can safely assume that fear of being proved wrong is behind their reticence.
Most people are unable to properly read anything other than the most simple graph.
If the IPCC ideas on global warming are correct then CO2 is insulation not extra energy in the system, and would tend to dampen extremes.
Think of the temperatures in a well insulated water heater vs just a pot. The water heater may warm up a bit faster than an equal sized bot or boiler (though the burner’s output would be much greater than any heat lost through the metal walls of the pot), but it would take much longer to cool down.
So if the atmosphere is a heat engine with emergent phenomena, El Nino’s and Nina’s, thunderstorms and other weather moving energy around, extra CO2 will just serve to slow down the transitions from cool to hot states.
Posting on phys.org, good for you. My account was suspended without warning and when I emailed to ask why, there was no response. I was always careful to be polite but regularly debunked their climate alarm articles. Never cussed, never called anyone names. Like Popular Science (which stopped allowing comments for the reason that it “inadvertently provided a platform for climate ‘disinformation'”) and Scientific American which has lost its mind with progressive/woke dogma, I stopped perusing the site when they went to full censorship. They don’t cater to customers who question their dogma, only to the true believers. Clearly, I’m not their audience, so I left. Let them stagnate in their echo chamber of climate misery.
Always makes me laugh when someone posts historical data and the response is “you aren’t a climate scientist”. But comparing current data to historical data is a job for any historian with statistics training, its not a job for a climate scientist.
Explaining the results of that data search is a job for a climate scientist, W.E. did both here.
Recently i got the “you aren’t a climate scientist” line, so i posted a link to W.E.’s “where is the emergency” WUWT item and i suggested they follow the link, read the data and then tell WE he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but i warned them to bring a bag or a bucket for after Willis hand them their head, the only result i have ever seen from such a challenge.
Thanks Pat.
I was going to post a comment in a similar vein regarding the slight Willis received –
My observation / question was along the lines of –
“as far as I am aware (and Prof Richard Lindzen had observed) there is no single person in the world who could have gained applicable expertise in ALL the scientific research disciplines needed to comprehensively master “climate science” .
I was hoping someone, somewhere would have attempted to list all the disciplines necessary for “climate science”.
This bloke has –
He writes –
Here is an incomplete list of what I consider to be the core scientific disciplines which have been primarily responsible for developing our current understanding of climate change and its implications –
Atmospheric and Physical Sciences:
Climatology, Meteorology, Atmospheric dynamics, Atmospheric physics, Atmospheric chemistry, Solar physics, Historical climatology
Earth Sciences:
Geophysics, Geochemistry, Geology, Soil Science, Oceanography, Glaciology, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoenvironmental reconstruction
Biological Sciences:
Ecology, Synthetic biology, Biochemistry, Global change biology, Biogeography, Ecophysiology, Ecological genetics
Mathematics, Statistics and Computational analysis:
Applied mathematics, Mathematical modelling, Computer science, Numerical modelling, Bayesian inference, Mathematical statistics, Time series analysis
Quite a diverse field and I’ve not listed many sub-disciplines.
https://bravenewclimate.com/2008/08/31/so-just-who-does-climate-science/
And, Michael Mann has his degrees in geology and geophysics, just like many here do. Yet, he is called a climatologist.
So the homeless have become the unhoused.
Illegal immigrants became undocumented migrants.
Truths about COVID vaccination problems became disinformation.
Complete FAA ATC failure became just a glitch.
A obviously stolen election 🗳️ became the big lie.
I am reminded of a saying attributed to A. Lincoln: “How many legs does a dog have if you call its tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.”
And the MSM cannot understand why their viewership is rapidly declining after Trump correctly named them Fake News?
BTW, nice analysis, WE. Different methods but same results for each of the 5 claimed increasing US weather extremes (heat waves, droughts, blizzards…) in the 2014 ‘official’ US National Climate Assessment. Essay Credibility Conundrums in ebook Blowing Smoke.
Thanks, Rud. Here’s one you left out:
• Drug dealers become undocumented pharmacists.
Best to you and yours,
w.
Perhaps your undocumented should be unlicensed. With licenses the bureaucracy enforce its dicta. Without licenses they cannot so armed violence is employed.
The liberal mentality seems to believe that if the name of something is changed to one that doesn’t have pejorative baggage, then all the social problems will be solved. What they don’t realize is that if one calls a skunk a rose, people will soon learn to associate the word “rose” with an unpleasant odor.
To add to your list of repellent PC euphemisms, p*dophiles are now to be called MAP’s (“Minor-Attracted Persons”).
Extreme Reporting? Definitely. (With a big boost after cellphone videos came out.)
Extreme Events? No.
Well, the worst is yet to come. The jet stream will remain over California for many more days.
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/sat/satlooper.php?region=us&product=ir
“While this may be true in theory”. It’s a half-arsed postulate, not a theory.
It will not be a weak rain.
It’s not just the homeless. In Melbourne, there has been some flooding of the Maribyrnong River. Of course, all of the people who built or bought houses that were built on the Maribyrnong River flood plain were complaining vociferously about the flooding. For some reason, they were surprised that their houses, that were built well below the 100 year flood level, got flooded. Why these housing developments were ever approved should be perplexing, but it’s fairly simple… lots of money for councils. City planners are supposed to be responsible enough to say, NO, you can’t put a housing estate on that river flood plain… but they aren’t.
Same thing happens here in UK Local Authorities agree to housing schemes on flood plains all the time, even when the so called Environment Agency has objections. Problem got so bad that thousands of households could not get home insurance and the Government had to step in and set up a joint scheme with the insurers. Hasn’t stopped building on flood plains though!
I would love to see the rainfall data correlated with La Niña cycles.
“Homeless people”. I think, in this case, the better term would be “squatters. People using the land without paying for it.
Warming seems to be making the climate more stable.
https://twitter.com/aaronshem/status/1611141654853079043
And harmful extremes exist way in the thin tails.
https://twitter.com/aaronshem/status/1126891475822891009
The term currently used by noble virtue signalers is “unhoused” …
___________________________________________________
In other words, the noble virtue signalers are “unhinged”
Isn’t california simply the North American analog to Australia?
The land of drought and floods?
When I was very young a popular song was “it never rains in california”.
I wonder how they came up with that 50 years ago
Thanks, Pat. Lyrics from 1972, you’re right, fifty years ago.
Same weather as always,
w.
‘The term currently used by noble virtue signalers is “unhoused” …’
That was so last week. A Denver government dashboard broke out the Covid infections in Denver in various shades of Black and White and then this: “People Suffering a Lack of Housing”
We’ve leapfrogged California!
Thanks, Bill. Had to laugh when I looked for synonyms …
Seems like the thesaurus hasn’t heard of any synonyms for “politically correct” …
w.
Hi Willis,
Not sure if somebody already mentioned this, but IMO what you did is not the right way to check if extremes (of the flooding kind) are increasing or not, because your source data is anual precipitation, and there is a LOT of averaging in the anual thing. Technically, you could have a very wet year without a single flooding occurence, and a dry year with very strong flooding somewhere in the middle of lots of dry months.
It is entirely possible and even likely that there will have been more floods or more severe floods in wet years… but I am not sure if the correlation will be strong enough for the two things to show the same trends.
Thanks, Nylo. My source data is monthly precipitation, not annual.
Also, there is no averaging at all in either monthly or annual precipitation. They are both sums of daily precipitation.
Regards,
w.
Sorry, my bad.
Two more Pacific lows will bring heavy precipitation to the US west coast.
Willis,
With measurements, the term Relative Standard deviation has long been used for the SD over the mean.
In the 1970s, measuring devices proliferated. Some, such as those measuring light absorption after passing through a medium, had a mathematically logarithmic response, which was sometimes made into linear by in-machine electronics. This enabled a display to look linear, but it was found that the SD grew rapidly as the lower detection limit was reached. Therefore, it became practice to divide the SD by the mean of its near-surrounds to get a more uniform number. Geoff S
Thanks, Geoff, didn’t know that. The good news is, there’s always more for me to learn.
w.
True. Another term used for it has been coefficient of variation and it has had a fair amount of use in the physical sciences, but sometimes uttering things from statistics is treated here as speaking the language of Mordor.
Quite a while ago I had similar conversations with folks about rainfall and snowfall time series and as I recall, when the data showed cumulants over a certain time frame (like monthly or yearly) did not trend the way it was desired, the claimants shifted to intensity arguments. Namely, while the overall amount or number of things might not be increasing the INTENSITY in short time intervals was and so there. I think folks have done this with tornadoes and some other phenomena, when the trend doesn’t behave properly fiddle with higher frequency spectra in the data. All of this of course without a specific theoretical prediction of what any the results should be. So be ready for the next wave of arguments that while your data shows the monthly trend, if you look at daily or hourly variability trends it is just awful how much worse it is getting. And if that doesn’t work something else will be tried. Oddly enough just the inverse of how real scientists work, trying very hard to find where one’s theory does NOT work instead of looking just for cases where it does.
Concerning the rains and flooding in California.
California has seen plenty of heavy rains and flooding in the past and anyone that claims that this “atmospheric river” is due to “climate change” is either misinformed or a liar.
Summary of Floods and Droughts in the Southwestern States (usgs.gov)
What is going to happen come this summer there is also nothing new and completely predictable. These rains will bring forth a much greener spring than usual and that vegetation will dry out c0me summer and thus California is in for a worse than average wildfire season this year. The fires will probably be worse if, as many are predicting, the current weakening La Nina turns into an El Nino by this summer.