The New York Times article “Latest Climate Report Warns of Major Upheaval to California Way of Life” by Soumya Karlamangla, claims California faces a future of bigger storms, more extreme floods, longer droughts, destructive wildfires, disappearing snowpack, and major disruption to everyday life because of climate change. This is highly misleading if not outright false. The historical and observational record shows that extreme storms, catastrophic floods, prolonged droughts, enormous wildfires, highly variable snowpack, and coastal erosion have always been defining features of California’s natural environment, while many of the Times’ most alarming claims are projections from climate models rather than observed trends.
The Times opens with a confident description of California’s future:
“Floods will become more widespread and extreme.”
It then warns of “more wildfires, bigger storms, longer droughts,” claiming California faces “major upheaval to long-established ways of life.”
Those are dramatic predictions. What the Times largely fails to provide is the historical context necessary to understand them.
California has always been a land of meteorological extremes. Its Mediterranean climate naturally produces long dry periods punctuated by episodes of tremendous precipitation. Atmospheric rivers carrying Pacific moisture into the state are not a recent creation of climate change. They are fundamental to California’s hydrology.
Perhaps the most obvious omission from the Times article is the Great Flood of 1861-1862.
Image courtesy of US Geological Survey.
According to the United States Geological Survey’s history of California storms and floods, a succession of powerful storms battered California for weeks. Rivers overflowed, levees failed, Sacramento flooded, and enormous portions of the Central Valley disappeared beneath water. The USGS describes the event as remaining “unparalleled in its magnitude.”
The storm sequence lasted approximately 45 days. The Sacramento Valley became an inland sea. The flooding was so severe that California lost roughly one-third of its taxable land, and Governor Leland Stanford reportedly traveled by rowboat to his inauguration.
This happened in 1861 and 1862, when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were far below today’s levels. Even that disaster wasn’t unprecedented.
The USGS ARkStorm project reports geological evidence of six megastorms larger than the 1861-1862 event during the past 1,800 years. The agency explicitly states that the Great Flood “is not a freak event,” and that there is no reason similar events will not happen again.
Another USGS review concludes that truly massive rainfall-driven California floods appear in the geological record roughly every 200 years.
That is rather important context when the New York Times tells readers that future extreme flooding represents a newly emerging climate threat.
The same applies to atmospheric rivers. The USGS calls them California’s primary storm mechanism and notes that just a few large atmospheric river events can determine whether a particular year is wet or dry. Researchers are studying sediment records precisely because the approximately 70-year instrumental record of atmospheric rivers is far too short to describe the full range of natural variability.
Climate change may alter the intensity of future atmospheric rivers. The USGS and climate-model studies project that possibility, and it should not be dismissed. But a projection of future change is not evidence that California historically lacked catastrophic atmospheric-river storms.
It plainly did not.
This is also why the Times’ presentation of flooding is so incomplete. Climate Realism has previously documented that major California flooding long predates modern warming, including the 1862 catastrophe and evidence of still larger prehistoric events.
More importantly, the observational precipitation record does not resemble the steadily worsening picture implied by the Times.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s California State Climate Summary shows enormous year-to-year variation in winter precipitation since the late 19th century. Its record of two-inch extreme precipitation events since 1930 likewise shows substantial variability rather than a simple upward march toward ever more extreme rainfall.
The Climate at a Glance California State Climate Summary, using NOAA data, similarly reports little overall change in California’s average annual precipitation since 1900 and no sustained increase in extreme precipitation events.
California’s drought history is equally inconvenient for the Times’ narrative.
NOAA’s reconstructed Palmer Drought Severity Index, seen in the figure below, extends California drought history back approximately 1,000 years using tree-ring and other proxy evidence. It shows repeated prolonged wet and dry periods centuries before industrialization.
California does not alternate between drought and deluge because its climate has suddenly become unstable. Alternating between drought and deluge is normal for California’s climate.
Climate Realism recently made precisely this point in response to similar claims about Highway 1: California’s pattern of drought followed by heavy precipitation is not historically unusual. Massive swings between flooding and drought have occurred for as long as historical and paleoclimate records allow us to examine.
Wildfires deserve the same historical perspective.
The Times tells readers that several destructive fires have occurred during the past decade and presents them as evidence of the trends Californians are supposedly beginning to experience.
But “destructive” is not synonymous with “climatically unprecedented.” Put millions more people, homes, power lines, roads, businesses, and expensive property into fire-prone landscapes, and the economic consequences of fires can increase even without a corresponding increase in the underlying natural hazard.
Fire itself is not an aberration in California. It is an integral part of the landscape.
A peer-reviewed study in Forest Ecology and Management estimated that approximately 1.8 million hectares, about 4.4 million acres, burned annually in prehistoric California before 1800. The researchers concluded that California’s skies were probably smoky through much of the summer and fall long before modern industrial emissions.
California’s own Fish & Wildlife agencies acknowledge the same history, explaining that the state’s ecosystems evolved with fire and citing estimates of approximately 4.4 million acres burned annually before 1800 through lightning and Native American burning.
Climate at a Glance reports that modern California wildfire counts and acreage do not show the simple steadily increasing pattern often implied by climate coverage, while emphasizing the importance of vegetation management, ignition sources, and California’s naturally fire-adapted ecosystems.
None of this means temperature and moisture have no influence on fire behavior. Of course they do. It means that portraying California wildfire as some novel product of modern climate change requires ignoring thousands of years of California fire ecology.
Then there is snowpack. The Times states that Sierra Nevada snowpack is projected to decline 40 percent by midcentury and 60 percent by 2100.
Notice the operative word: projected.
NOAA’s State Climate Summary shows observed Donner Summit snow-water-equivalent record shows tremendous natural variability. April 1 snowpack has ranged from almost nothing to more than 80 inches of water equivalent during the observational period. Record-high values occurred in 1952 and 1983, while extremely low values occurred in 1963, 1988, 2014, and 2015.
The Fifth Climate Change Assessment cited by the Time does not measure California’s snowpack in 2050 or 2100. It cannot. Its future hydrology estimates are produced by feeding downscaled global climate model output into additional hydrological models. California’s own technical documentation describes precisely that modeling chain.
There is nothing illegitimate about using models to explore possible futures. Policymakers need scenarios for planning.
But scenarios are not observations, and newspapers should stop writing about modeled conditions decades from now as though they were measurements already taken.
The Times even acknowledges that the state assessment contains multiple scenarios based on different future greenhouse gas emissions levels, and quotes a state official saying, “The future is not predetermined.” Yet most of the article is written as though it is.
The same problem appears in the claim that as much as three-quarters of California’s beaches “could disappear” by 2100. Latest Climate Report Warns of … Again, “could.”
California’s coastline has been eroding, uplifting, subsiding, sliding, and rearranging itself for millennia. Local relative sea level also varies substantially because California is tectonically active. NOAA tide gauges presently show trends ranging from 5.08 mm per year at North Spit to minus 0.76 mm per year at Crescent City, where the land is rising faster than the ocean. Los Angeles’ long-term gauge shows approximately 1.07 mm per year, equivalent to about 0.35 feet per century if that linear trend continued unchanged.
That is considerably more complicated than “climate change will erase California’s beaches.”
Finally, the Times warns that California agriculture could suffer dramatically, including fruit-yield reductions and less irrigated acreage. Latest Climate Report Warns of … Yet actual agricultural data do not show California agriculture collapsing under recent warming. Climate at a Glance reports, for example, substantial long-term increases in almond production and yields and increased strawberry production.
Again, observations and projections are different things.
California has warmed. Additional warming can affect snow levels, heat extremes, ecosystems, and water management. Those are legitimate subjects for research and prudent planning. But that is a very different proposition from the New York Times’ portrayal of a state approaching some historically unfamiliar climatic upheaval.
California was experiencing catastrophic floods before automobiles existed. It endured megadroughts centuries before coal-fired power plants. Millions of acres burned annually before European settlement. Atmospheric rivers battered the coast long before anyone coined the term “climate change.” Beaches eroded, mountains shed landslides, Sierra snowpack swung wildly from year to year, and Californians learned to build reservoirs, aqueducts, levees, firebreaks, and flood-control systems because this has always been an extraordinarily variable and sometimes violent environment.
The lesson of California history is not that nature was once benign and humans somehow broke it. The lesson is that California has never been climatically benign.
The New York Times could have used California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment to discuss sensible adaptation to a state naturally prone to flood, drought, fire, erosion, and enormous weather variability. Instead, it largely presents model projections as an approaching climate reckoning while giving readers almost none of the historical context needed to judge those projections.
California doesn’t need another climate horror story. It needs reporters willing to look backward at the data before confidently telling readers what catastrophe awaits them ahead.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
