From the Cliff Mass Weather Blog
Cliff Mass
Northwest drought is being exaggerated by a group including publicly funded agencies, the media, local government, and climate activists.
At its essence, it is ideological, anti-science, political, and self-serving.
This blog will go into the problem in greater depth than my analysis of last week.
The center of what might be called the Drought Exaggeration Industry is the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which is associated with the United States Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The most viewed product of this National Drought Center is the Drought Monitor graphic, the national view of which is shown below.
To see how nonsensical and anti-science this effort is, consider the latest drought map for Washington State (released yesterday, and shown below).
Most of Washington State is “abnormally dry” or in drought, with severe or extreme drought over the eastern slopes of the Cascades and the far portion of the state (see below).
As shown below, this is total nonsense and inconsistent with hard data.
Precipitation has been above normal, soils are moist, rivers are above normal levels, reservoirs are above normal, and snowpack is in decent shape.
But this wacky website does not end there. It claims that 2.4 million Washington residents are in drought:
It states that 1,778,920 King County residents, many of whom are dealing with flooded roads, failing levees, and sodden fields, are affected by drought.
But the national drought meisters don’t stop there! They inform us that in KING COUNTY, 3266 cattle and 755 sheep are in drought. And that thousands of acres of King County hay are in drought.
Perhaps the national drought folks should speak to one of our local cows, many of which have been moved to escape flooding (see below)
It is easy to prove that the drought claims for Washington State are entirely baseless.
For the past 90 days, precipitation over Washington has been near normal (light green or yellow) or above normal (blue and purple).
Soil moisture is above normal over much of the state and MUCH above normal over the eastern Cascades slopes, where the drought monitor graphic has moderate to severe drought. Go figure.
Our rivers are mostly running above normal levels, some at near record levels (black dots, particularly east of the Cascades):
Reservoirs are way above normal. The critical Yakima storage system….the fixation of the drought folks for a long time…. is not only above normal, but at levels commonly found at the end of winter.
Seattle’s reservoirs are way above normal (see below) as are most of the others in the region.
What about snowpack, another fixation of the drought folks? Good news, there has been lots of recent snow in the mountains, and most ski areas are open for Christmas.
Below are the latest numbers, which show a stunning recovery from a few weeks ago. The snowpack feeding the Columbia River is now ABOVE NORMAL, and the snowpack for most of the western Cascades is 75% of normal. More snow is expected during the next few days.
By any rational analysis, there is no drought going on.
There will be plenty of water for all uses. Furthermore, this is a La Niña year, which is usually good for water resources.
The unsupportable and unscientific drought talk is very destructive and counterproductive.
It induces fear and worry in the population, particularly the most psychologically vulnerable. It results in poor decision-making.
Who are some folks doing this?
Some are doing it to promote their politics and ideology. Others to push a climate change agenda, which they either believe in or profit from. Media, such as the Seattle Times Climate Lab, do so for clicks and financial support from activist groups. YouTube and social media channels do it for clicks and advertising revenue.
But whatever their reasons, I hope that the current administration takes a deep look at this drought-pushing enterprise and reforms the government-supported side of the advocacy campaign.
Wishing all of you a good holiday.
Crying wolf is a bad idea
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Maybe they really meant Texas?
Nielsen-Gammon J., et al., and 11 other authors. (2020) Unprecedented drought challenges for Texas water resources in a changing climate: What do researchers and stakeholders need to know? Earth’s Future 8(8):e2020EF001552.
https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EF001552
Story tip. Too much information here to consider without lots of time but it appears that they have bought into the certainty of unprecedented rapidity of warming with drought. Helped with models and tree rings while there has been a difficult to evaluate historical climate with extreme conditions. Figure 1 based on “Anomalies are relative to a 1980–1999 baseline.” Lots of references and authors in this century, only found one (1992) dealing with the coastal salt waters, only two estuaries.
Another “don’t believe your lying eyes or the facts” to bolster the AGW scam.
Dr. Mass has provided excellent weather and climate information on his blog over the years. Numerous times I’ve suggested to the Seattle Times that they collaborate with Dr. Mass rather than continue to publish much less accurate information, but to no avail.
That’s because the goal of the Seattle Times is to propagate propaganda, in pursuit of leftist, globalist causes. Accurate information would put them out of business.
A similar discussion was started for the German state Bavaria about five years ago, when a 20 year trend showed a statistically significant trend towards low precipitation and drought.
Five years later the current situation has to a large degree normalized (there is still some of this trend detectable for a part of the year – I believe the summer months) average precipitation and ground water level are very unspectacular after a few years with higher rainfall.
The disconnect between reality and claims is strange. I think it’s because the activists believe that “today” is an anomaly, part of natural variation, but what they speak of is the “underlying reality”. An analogy: a psychotic person has moments of sanity, but we still call them psychotic for their “underlying” condition.
It might explain how they say the summer is hot when locally it’s cold, even on a national level! Or in reverse: homeless is not a problem despite San Francisco etc, because in small towns in Nebraska there aren’t any homeless. All statements are about a global perception, despite conditions being locally caused. Normal weather shifts are thus a global condition.
In the minds of Climate Change activists, “weather” IS Climate. And the present IS history: the global cooling of the LIA and even the early 70s didn’t and COULDN’T have occurred, because global temperatures TODAY are not dropping.
Hmmmm …
The disconnect between reality and claims is not strange when you consider that media thrive on sensationalism, the more lurid and terrifying, the better. Media need eyeballs. Truth is secondary.
As an aside, truth is not stranger than fiction. That may have been so at one time, but journalistic honesty is way out of fashion these days.
“The disconnect between reality and claims is not strange when you consider that media thrive on sensationalism, the more lurid and terrifying, the better. Media need eyeballs. Truth is secondary.”
No, that’s not it. Their goal is the same goal as the Globalists, who want to see the downfall of Western dominance. So they dutifully spew the propaganda.
“homeless is not a problem despite San Francisco etc, because in small towns in Nebraska there aren’t any homeless.”
Nick Johnson in his YouTube channel shows homeless all over America- though especially on the west coast, but the problem is now almost everywhere. He likes to show them because his viewers love to see them. 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/@NickJohnson/videos
I live in a small town (pop ~ 25k), and yes, we have homeless. I see them ranting at no one all the time.
Drought can be useful. There is also much narrative building falsely connecting high beef prices to climate change. It’s routine misleading political rhetoric that seeks to use an unrelated problem to bolster the climate mission. Rising beef prices are primarily driven by supply chain disruptions, historic lows in cattle herd size, and skyrocketing feed costs—certainly not climate change.
Making this link promotes climate change policies that have neither altered nor benefited anything related to weather, drought, or cattle production.
I would appreciate a drought in climate alarmism, that would be truly beneficial.
Climate change increased Melissa’s maximum wind speeds by 7% and extreme rainfall by 16%, the team at World Weather Attribution, a consortium of 20 researchers from the US, UK, Sweden, Dominican Republic, Netherlands, Jamaica and Cuba, found. – Yawn
World Weather Attribution –
L.M.F.A.O.
These clowns reckon the can assign a likelihood % of a hurricane’s addition strength due to climate change within a few days of its formation.
If WWA wanted to establish some basic credibility for their conjectures, wouldn’t it have been a good idea for them to start with observed / recorded past hurricanes’ characteristics.
And then explain how hurricanes in these long past eras were just as devastating as today’s “climate change fueled” hurricanes.
Like the 1935 Cat 5 that hit Florida and killed 408 people as just one example, and many many more events in the 1900s.
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastint.shtml
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/deadly/index.html
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/deadly/Table2.htm
Is there any punishment for an abuse of public money this way?
Sadly, no.
“Precipitation has been above normal, soils are moist, rivers are above normal levels, reservoirs are above normal, and snowpack is in decent shape.”
but.. but… if something is above or below “normal”, then its sounds like an emergency, a catastrophe, a disaster- must be due to MAGA folks burning fossil fuels. We need green energy and socialism to make it all normal again. /s 🙂
The only thing that reverting to “normal” without fossil fuels will get you is sailing ships, spinning wheels and horse carriages.
A Request to Dr. Cliff Mass and his staff at the University of Washington:
Some climate models say there will be more droughts in more places as the earth’s climate warms.
Other climate models say there will more rain in some places, but less rain in other places, as the earth’s climate warms.
Climate activists say that American leadership in reaching Net Zero by 2050 is crucial for convincing other nations, especially India and China, to quickly reduce their own carbon emissions.
As these climate activists state the problem, the world as a whole will not reach Net Zero unless American leadership shows the way.
Suppose we assume for purposes of discussion that the United States reaches Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050, and that most of the world’s other nations including India and China follow suit and reach Net Zero by 2075.
What is needed for purposes of an honest and informed debate concerning US energy policy is a set of climate model runs which embody mainstream climate science’s current thinking about the impacts of CO2 on the earth’s climate, and which predict:
1 — The concentration of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere in the years 2075, 2100, 2125, and 2150 if the United States reaches Net Zero by 2050 and the entire world reaches Net Zero by 2075.
2 — The earth’s global mean temperature in the years 2075, 2100, 2125, and 2150 if the United States reaches Net Zero by 2050 and the world reaches Net Zero by 2075.
The University of Washington does extensive climate research using its access to mainstream climate modeling codes.
The UW climate modeling staff could produce the necessary pair of climate model runs for each of the years 2075, 2100, 2025, and 2150.
Furthermore, and just as important, the UW staff could document the assumptions and the uncertainties associated with those particular model runs in ways which would serve to greatly increase the transparency of today’s mainstream climate science thinking.
How about it, Dr. Mass? Are you game for this proposal?
“2 — The earth’s global mean temperature in the years 2075, 2100, 2125, and 2150 if the United States reaches Net Zero by 2050 and the world reaches Net Zero by 2075.”
A completely meaningless, made-up number is not needed for anything, except propaganda.
No dice, Jeff. Climate skeptics such as Lord Monckton have their own estimates of future GMT based upon their own various estimates of the climate’s true sensitivity to carbon emissions. And they use these sensitivity estimates in their written and spoken criticisms of the mainstream climate models.
By doing so, by using their own climate sensitivity estimates based on their own physical and mathematical analyses to refute the mainstream climate models, the climate skeptics have bought in to the use of GMT as a rough index of the state of the earth’s climate system. This train has already left the station and you are not going to call it back.
“the climate skeptics have bought in to the use of GMT as a rough index of the state of the earth’s climate system.”
WRONG,
… many of the climate realists know it is a meaningless unmeasurable piece of nonsense..
……
… Seeing as the only atmospheric warming in the last 46 years has come from El Nino event, and no-one can forecast El Nino events more than a year or so ahead, if that…
… the whole idiotology of “climate forecast” even 20 or years in the future is sheer nonsense
bnice2000, when climate model critics estimate climate sensitivity to be 1.1 degrees C per doubling of CO2 concentration — or 1.2 degrees C or 1.3 degrees C, or some other figure in degrees C significantly lower than what the mainstream climate models predict — they are clearly referring to the effects on global mean temperature in making their criticisms.
There is no other interpretation which can be given to their use of degrees C per doubling of CO2 in stating their analytical outcomes. Get used to it because their employment of GMT in this fashion isn’t going away.
One problem might be that some newer models have been shown to prove unrealistic results.
https://news.umich.edu/some-of-the-latest-climate-models-provide-unrealistically-high-projections-of-future-warming/
Older versions of those very models were within expectations, so clearly there is something very wrong with the uncertainty estimates.
Laws of Nature, a key point of my request to Dr. Mass and his UW staff is that they fully document the assumptions and the uncertainties associated with the 2075, 2100, 2125, and 2150 model runs in ways which add transparency to the mainstream climate science modeling approach and process.
I’ll note that late last winter when I made a similar request over on Judith Curry’s blog; i.e., that the mainstream climate science community should produce a series of model runs based on achieving Net Zero targets in the years 2050 and 2075, there was strong pushback on that blog from members of the mainstream club.
Why was there pushback? The basic reason is that the climate models depend on a number of assumptions which have important uncertainties associated with them. The great bulk of the mainstream climate science community doesn’t want to see the quality of their work examined in a contextual setting where knowledgeable critics have a strong incentive to look closely at the details of what is being done.
Tying a series of models runs directly and explicitly to the activist’s policy objective of the US achieving Net Zero by 2050 and the world achieving Net Zero by 2075 is a means of supplying both the incentive and the contextual setting in which a professional examination of the modeling work can be accomplished in a way which informs policy decision makers of the issues surrounding today’s mainstream climate science dogma.
Actually, I don’t think our opinions on this are too far apart.
I am not sure if Mass or others realoy do account for all important sources of uncertainty, but once they start things seem to get ugly fast..
For example G. Schmidt’s Arctic sea ice trends posted on Realclimate.
Assuming the shaded areas represent uncertainties, the error bars for the modeled trends seems too big to allow any meaningful analysis or comparison with measurements (which did not stop him from doing exactly that – seemingly ignoring the uncertainty)
Northwest drought? You mean where all the flooding is happening again?
But think of the Children. They just will not know how to make a peanut butter sandwitch.
King Co – 4 acres of wheat in drought.
re: “But think of the Children.”
The Somali children especially, missing from daycare centers ALL OVER Minnesota. They have probably been ‘baked into pies’, pork pies the Brits call them? In any case –
This is simply another example of the alarmists claiming the most minor or short-term variations from the norm as positive proof of man-made climate change. Whether they have enough data to back up their claims is immaterial to them as long as a sympathetic media is willing to publicize their inaccuracies and a credulous public is willing to accept them. Fortunately the latter has become much more dismissive of their claims since it realizes acceptance of them would just cost it more money while having little or no effect on what’s a non-problem anyway.
It was my understanding that drought required a considerable time frame of dry conditions. The weather services I am exposed to show daily changes in drought conditions. That doesn’t make sense. I might believe daily dry conditions but not drought. I see no reason to believe most of what they report.
Somewhere in my collection of memes: a photo taken in London. The background – a double decker bus with a sign on the side, “We Are In Drought”. The foreground – a sea of open umbrellas.
A drought, a dearth, of: cognition, observational capability or ability; recognition of things, the ambience/the atmosphere around that one finds oneself a part of in the immediate. In short a veritable drought in intelligence, not of knowledge, but rather actual intelligence …
G’day _Jim,
American Heritage Dictionary:
drought /drout/ noun
A long period of abnormally low rainfall, especially one that adversely affects growing or living conditions.
A prolonged dearth or shortage.
Dryness; want of rain or of water; especially, such dryness of the weather as affects the earth, and prevents the growth of plants; aridity
AHD does seem to concentrate on weather/climate.
My family farms in western Washington. There is no drought.
DROUGHT? The Drought Monitor site is always misleading —
The Misunderstanding of Drought
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/11/20/the-misunderstanding-of-drought/
Doubts About Droughts
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/08/18/doubts-about-droughts/
Just Believe and Drought Not
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/11/10/just-believe-and-drought-not/