In what is being called the worst drought in state history, the “megadrought” faced by California is being blamed on man-made global warming. The state’s website on the subject lists what people can do to help, what they cannot do, and what the state itself is doing. Without doubt, the water shortage is a serious problem for the state and farmers. The Pacific Institute’s website on the drought also helps people and farmers cope. The US Department of Agriculture has a website specifically for farming even though California has seen an a drop in large fruit and nut production in (a trend that started before the drought), small berry production has been on the increase.
Clearly a drought has repercussions as water is essential for life, but is this drought really worse than anything in history, and is it really caused by global warming? NBC quotes a scientist from the University of Albany as saying “California has been gradually warming over the last 30 years.” Taking a closer look at the temperature data, I downloaded the monthly temps LAX for the period of 1945 to 2014 and inputed them in the following graph. In the month of July, for example, the appeared to be no increase in the maximum temperature.
NBC also provided the following:
This index, known as the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), shows the deviations from from normal precipitation levels. A positive number means more precipitation than average, while the negative means less precipitation than average. It gives an alarming view. When actual precipitation is plotted, however, one gets a less than onerous view of what is happening.
Statewide precipitation (inches) – Source
At least the NBC article admitted that the next cycle of El Niño (a surface temperature phenomenon that is characterized by unusually warm temperatures) should bring rain by the fall and last into the beginning of next year.
In June of this 2015, the American Meterological Society published the a paper paper with the following abstract:
An analysis of the October 2013–September 2014 precipitation in the western United States and in particular over the California–Nevada region suggests this anomalously dry season, while extreme, is not unprecedented in comparison with the approximately 120-yr-long instrumental record of water year (WY; October–September) totals and in comparison with a 407-yr WY precipitation reconstruction dating back to 1571. Over this longer period, nine other years are known or estimated to have been nearly as dry or drier than WY 2014. The 3-yr deficit for WYs 2012–14, which in California exceeded the annual mean precipitation, is more extreme but also not unprecedented, occurring three other times over the past approximate 440 years in the reconstruction. WY precipitation has also been deficient on average for the past 14 years, and such a run of predominantly dry WYs is also a rare occurrence in the authors’ merged reconstructed plus instrumental period record.
This doesn’t stop those who want to force us to change our environmentally destructive lifestyle from blaming this, and other droughts, on our emissions of CO2 (see here, here and here).
The extreme atmospheric conditions associated with California’s crippling drought are far more likely to occur under today’s global warming conditions than in the climate that existed before humans emitted large amounts of greenhouse gases.
This, I beg to differ, is certainly not the case. As with everything else in the climate, nothing is happening beyond normal variation. Thus there is no way to link any “deviation” of normal climate on us. A Nature Magazine article in 2012 dropped a bombshell on this climate change causing more drought “consensus” being thrown at us. The abstract reads:
Drought is expected to increase in frequency and severity in the future as a result of climate change, mainly as a consequence of decreases in regional precipitation but also because of increasing evaporation driven by global warming1, 2, 3. Previous assessments of historic changes in drought over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries indicate that this may already be happening globally. In particular, calculations of the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) show a decrease in moisture globally since the 1970s with a commensurate increase in the area in drought that is attributed, in part, to global warming4, 5. The simplicity of the PDSI, which is calculated from a simple water-balance model forced by monthly precipitation and temperature data, makes it an attractive tool in large-scale drought assessments, but may give biased results in the context of climate change6. Here we show that the previously reported increase in global drought is overestimated because the PDSI uses a simplified model of potential evaporation7 that responds only to changes in temperature and thus responds incorrectly to global warming in recent decades. More realistic calculations, based on the underlying physical principles8 that take into account changes in available energy, humidity and wind speed, suggest that there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years. The results have implications for how we interpret the impact of global warming on the hydrological cycle and its extremes, and may help to explain why palaeoclimate drought reconstructions based on tree-ring data diverge from the PDSI-based drought record in recent years9, 10.
It’s refreshing and abnormal to see such frankness and departure from the official narrative. Yet another analysis, this one on the North American drought variability over the past millennium, indicates that these periods of long drought in the US are not abnormal, but just luckily, do not occur in abundance.
Even globally, drought has not gotten worse. Few are aware the Sahara Desert has only been a desert of its current size for the last 5,500 years. As recently as six millennia ago, the terrain of the would be Sahara Desert consisted of savannah plains abundant with wildlife. It goes without saying that gasoline consumption had no effect on the Sahara 5,500 years ago.
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