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California's Hot, Dry Winters Tied To Climate Change
mdsolar sends word that hot dry winters may be the norm in the future for California. "Climate change is one of the most prominent public health issues currently on the CDC's radar. The organization's Climate and Health Program attempts to help state and city health departments to prepare for the health impacts of climate change, which can come in the form of things like temperature extremes, air pollution, allergens, and changes in disease patterns; they can also be felt indirectly through issues like food security. Since 2012, California has been in the midst of a record-setting drought, with extremely warm and dry conditions characterizing the last three years in that state. A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that warming caused by humans is responsible for the conditions that have led to this California drought. This study, published by scientists affiliated with the Department of Environmental Earth System Science and the Woods Institute for Environment at Stanford University, used historical statewide data for observed temperature, precipitation, and drought in California. The investigators used the Palmer Hydrological Drought Index (PHDI) and the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), collected by the National Climatic Data Center, as measures of the severity of wet/dry anomalies. They also used global climate model simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) to compare historical predictions for anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic historical climates."
In the example of fossil fuels, recently the price worldwide has dropped markedly.
Despite this, consumption has dropped.
Your claim may be obvious, but "obvious" in the same way as it's "Obvious the sky is a dome above our heads".
Some insights....I grew up in San Diego, droughts were fairly common.
I returned to southern California for school, and was there for the last half of the nineties, you know...those uber-hot years. Guess what, we were getting more rain those hot years. People were talking about the decades old drought finally coming to an end.
Than it began to get cooler again, and the droughts returned. For your info, droughts, deserts, etc are often tied to global cooling. Cooler global temperatures lock up moisture as ice. Resulting in increased ice caps, but also increased equatorial deserts.
Higher temperatures result in a much more humid global climate. Greener, greater moisture content. So when I see all the references to droughts. I think global cooling, not global warming.
While that is climate change. It's Earth, the climate is always changing - I'd be more afraid if it wasn't. The earth has experienced far cooler periods, and periods that were twenty degrees hotter than today. Life continued and thrived.
So you have to wonder why this was modded -1.
There are no personal attacks.
There are no disparaging remarks.
It doesn't link to fake data, indeed, it uses data derived from the AGW community itself.
The only real answer is that someone doesn't want people to see it, in true Slashdot fashion.
yes....hundreds if not thousands of years ago, and caused by reasons unknown.
that however doesn't mean this current drought isn't climate change related, just like the argument that "it was warmer before" doesn't negate global warming now.
the immediate cause of this current drought is known: for several years in a row now the snowpack of the Sierras has not been replenished.
Overall yearly precipitation, including general rainfall is down, far lower than normal. But even in "dry" years with little or no rain, the state generally gets by as the majority of its water supply from the snowpack melting throughout the year. So while a lack of rain primarily impacts the fire season, it is still survivable. But a repeated a lack of winter snows in the mountains is devastating.
And the question is then "what's causing the lack of snow?"
The weather patterns usually bring in moisture laden air over the winter that dumps in the Sierras. But lately those patterns have been dry.
And if that can be linked to the planet's warming, then the case starts to be made. the hurricane season was less the past year as well, and those are also dependent on moisture laden air
why do you have a "yard"?
Use local plants that are adapted to your climate. Seattle has been doing this and reducing water use for lawns at the same time. Plus, greener.
Also, when you mow your lawn, use a mulching mower, mow 3 to 6 inch not 1/2 inch, let the cut grass stay in the lawn. Less fertilizer, less water. Deep soak once a week IN EVENING not during the day when salt buildup from evaporation happens. Less water, better growth, better roots.
You're not getting our nuclear fusion plants that we're making at the UW until you adapt.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Meanwhile, Central Europe had only about 7 days total this winter when mid-day temperature would stay below 0 degrees Celsius. That's in places where there used to be 10 inches of snow from early December to mid-March some 20 years ago and temperature wouldn't rise above -10 degrees Celsius until March.
I think the oceans will need to get considerably warmer before the next ice age happens, unless a chain of volcanos lets off (as the deccan trapps once did).
FWIW, as the temperature difference between the poles and the equator decreased the jet streams slowed. This makes it more likely of a weather patten to squat in one place and not move. This gives either hot and dry or cold and dry or hot and really wet or cold and icy...but a decrease in weather that rapidly changes from one variety to another...which means the percieved weather becomes more extreme.
That paragraph was in the simple past because it's describing what has been happening in the last several years. Predictions are that this will continue and the jet stream will get even slower as the Arctic continues to warm faster than the equator. So global warming causes both increased hot spells and increased cold spells and increased flooding and increased drought...just not all in the same place. And only the average temperature increases, and that not enough to be quickly measureable.
Sorry, complex systems defy simple analysis.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's an interesting graphic. But there's no clear attribution. Even for the couple of lines where there is explicit attribution, it's not clearly defined what the attribution means. Were it the part of a larger article in which the missing data were provided, and with links so it could be verified, it would be very interesting. (I'd still wonder exactly what it meant and, I admit, I might not follow up. But that graphic is so cryptic that it could mean many different things. And it's not clear that the predictions are even predicting the same thing (measured feature) as the measurements are measuring.)
How about a graph from the IPCC itself then instead, you can verify it in their AR5 report here. Not nearly as bad, but very clearly showing the last decade or more trending at the very low end of the models.
By agriculture, you mean livestock.. Livestock soak up 50% of CA's water use. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120915/american-west-drought-being-worsened-livestock-industry