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."

Comments

Price Controls?

[_Sharp'r_]

Have they considered asking economists about the effects of price controls on water for agricultural uses?

Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one... if you hold down the price of water, people (especially larger users) will use more of it, not less of it...

Re:Price Controls?

[MachineShedFred]

Now wait just a damn minute. Are you trying to tell us that it's stupid and completely irresponsible to grow monsoon crops in an arid desert environment, and then bitch when there isn't enough water to go around?

Re:Price Controls?

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Re:Price Controls?

[ganjadude]

wow. you sure love telling others what they can and cant do huh????

Re:Price Controls?

[danbert8]

It's obviously man made climate change that is the problem with growing grapes and rice in the desert!

Re:Price Controls?

[smooth wombat]

why do you have a "yard"?

Because they like the feel of grass under their feet rather than concrete? They like to create a cooler micro-climate around their home? Because they have kids who can play on the safety of their own place? They want some distance between them and their neighbors? They like the smell of grass? They can lay out during the summer without having to worry about anyone else?

There are a number of reasons people have a yard. Even more amazing, they can still be green by modifying how they take care of it while still enjoying the benefits.

Re:Price Controls?

[Firethorn]

It has a history of 50+ year long droughts (and some much longer in reality- just with 1-2 year breaks between 50 year spells).

Doesn't this mean that 'desert' is the normal situation, with occasional 50 year flooding/rains?

Re:Price Controls?

[SoftwareArtist]

I'm going to do something very foolish and imagine that you actually believe what you're saying, that you're not just being a troll, and that you actually think the data supports your conclusions. And now I'm going to explain why you're wrong, indulging in the fantasy that you'll listen with an open mind and, once you realize your mistake, freely acknowledge it. Prove me right. Or wrong. Your choice.

Also, ignore the arctic ice that's been increasing for three years,

Three years? Three years is random noise. The climate consists of steady, long term trends with lots of short term fluctuations superimposed on top of them. Take artic ice, for example. It shrinks every summer and grows every winter. There are lots of factors that affect the summer minimum: wind patterns, ocean currents, etc. A few years ago, lots of factors converged to give an exceptionally low minimum. It hasn't matched that since; but it's come close, and has remained far below anything seen until just a decade ago.

Here's a graph showing sea ice for almost 40 years: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_i.... Yes, it fluctuates up and down from year to year. But look at that and tell me it shows anything other than fluctuations around a steady decreasing trend that remains upbroken.

Let's look at something even more convincing: world wide temperatures. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist.... Look at those graphs, and then tell me they show anything other than short term fluctuations on a long term warming trending that has been in place for the last century.

Ignore Niagara falls that has frozen over two years in a row and ignore all the record cold around the country.

Wrong! There has not been record cold "around the country". Believe me, the whole western half of the country has been getting record heat, as has most of the planet. Here's a map showing it: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/.... Those are the difference between Jan. 2015 temperatures and historical (1981-2010) average temperatures. The red areas are hotter than average. The blue areas are colder than average. Yes, there's a small blue patch over the eastern US. But overall there's a lot more red than blue.

This is why scientists tend to prefer the term "climate change" to "global warming". Yes, the globe is warming up, but that doesn't mean everything is exactly the same, just uniformly warmer. Some times and places are a lot warmer. Others are only a little warmer. Others are actually cooler. Wind patterns are changing. Ocean currents are changing. Precipitation patterns are changing. Sea level is rising. Permafrost it melting. The climate is changing.

And if you want to know precisely how global warming is causing unusually cold weather in the eastern US, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P....

Ignore the fact NAS falsified the CO2 hypothesis in 2010

Sorry, but that is just BS. You linking to a story about how fungi help to hold onto carbon and keep it out of the atmosphere, and somehow translated that into "NAS falsified the CO2 hypothesis". No. I don't know what you think that article actually meant, but I can assure you that isn't what it meant. (OK, I see you also linked to that Register piece that totally misrepresented the conclusions of that study. The Register is a notorious denialist website. Believe me, the scientists who actually did the work would not agree with the conclusions they're trying to draw from it.)

No one has "falsified the CO2 hypothesis". In fact, it was recently proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, by actually directly measuring the incoming and outgoing radiation, showing that the CO2 abso

Re:Price Controls?

[rahvin112]

He is right about the extent of Antarctic sea ice, increasing, in the last few years it's been the highest winter extent in recorded history. The problem is that the extent of sea ice (ice floating on the ocean) is an irrelevant measure of anything. There could be hundreds of causes and most have nothing to do with climate change (natural fluctuations) and the few that do actually relate to climate change point to severe consequences and are supporting evidence.

One recent study of salinity levels showed that antarctic sea saline levels were lower than previously recorded values. Lower saline levels would cause dramatically increased amounts of sea ice but there are only two major reasons saline levels could drop (other than bad measurements). The first is that the mixing currents at the pole that cause high saline warm water from the inter-ocean currents to surface are beginning to cease. This would be catastrophic to local climates and actually cause regions near each pole to get colder as the warm tropical waters that keep northern climates warm stop. The second is that significant melting of the glaciers on Antarctica have begun and at a significant enough rate that local ocean salinity is declining because inter-ocean mixing currents cannot keep up. Melting of the Antarctica glaciers (3 miles thick) would portend massive massive sea level increases on the orders of hundreds of feet. Not even the worst climate change predictions predict Antarctica glacial melt on this scale.

The reason the sea ice extent is most likely irrelevant is because it's temporary. It's ice that builds up in the winter and melts in the summer. Even if sea ice levels are the highest ever seen during the winter, they are at the same time the lowest ever seen during the summer. This includes the massive massive ice shelves (the portion of the glacier that is floating on the ocean) that have broken off and disintegrated.

The anti-climate change people like to point at antarctic sea ice levels without ever talking about the details. Most I doubt even understand what any of it is or means, they are simply reporting a sound bite they heard on TV or the internet.

I feel like a drought denialer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sympathies for the AGW folks.

Because I'm in California, and it's so goddamned terrible here that car washes are still operating at maximum efficiency.

And we're still farming where we have no business farming.

And we're still demanding people water their lawns.

And our water is still cheaper than other states I've lived in.

It's terrible, let me tell you.

Re:I feel like a drought denialer.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because all the wells the farmers are using are still at ~15-20% of historic levels. In a year or two when thats used up too and the shit really hits the fan, it will be time to do something about it. And by do something I mean point fingers.

Models compared to reality

[Anonymous Coward]

Models compared with reality.

Re:Models compared to reality

[MightyMartian]

Perhaps it is because there is no source of this chart. Who made it? Where does it come from?

Re:Models compared to reality

[HiThere]

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.)

Re:Models compared to reality

[next_ghost]

Each of those 90 models has an error margin around the line shown in the picture. The line itself is meaningless, the error margin around it is the most important result.

Re:Models compared to reality

[rockout]

Bullshit. The chart came from one Dr. Roy Spencer, who is not only a climatologist who has made a career out of claiming he's right and most scientists are wrong, but is also a noted creationist ("intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism" is my favorite quote from him on the topic).

Here's a nice summation of how he fudged numbers in order to come up with that bogus chart: http://blog.hotwhopper.com/201...

To your point of "I may be wrong", let me say, yes.... yes you are.

Re:Models compared to reality

[BCGlorfindel]

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.

Re:Models compared to reality

[sjames]

What's really funny is that even with the screwing around, the chart still clearly shows global warming. It's like a serial killer arguing that he should be acquitted of all 15 charges because the evidence clearly shows that he only killed 11 people at random.

Re:Models compared to reality

[BCGlorfindel]

Why is everyone avoiding actual models from actual research? googleusercontent is also not a recognized climate expert.

The IPCC is, if you look back I linked to the actual IPCC AR5 article for the original. The thing is that it's a couple hundred pages as a pdf document, so I included a link to just the graph as well. If that's too avoidy for you, it's not my problem.

Re:Models compared to reality

[BCGlorfindel]

Bullshit. The chart came from one Dr. Roy Spencer, who is not only a climatologist who has made a career out of claiming he's right and most scientists are wrong, but is also a noted creationist ("intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism" is my favorite quote from him on the topic).

Here's a nice summation of how he fudged numbers in order to come up with that bogus chart: http://blog.hotwhopper.com/201...

To your point of "I may be wrong", let me say, yes.... yes you are.

For those wanting a similar graph of models versus measured there is a graph from the IPCC AR5 report here. It shows models aren't as bad as the grandparent, but it DOES clearly show the last decade or more trending at the very low end of the models.

"Linked/tied to climate change"

[Anonymous Coward]

Any two trending time series will be correlated. These links don't mean anything substantial has been detected. Predict something precise then it is worth paying attention.
http://www.tylervigen.com/

Re:"Linked/tied to climate change"

[HiThere]

You are making the assumption that the changes in ocean currents are unrelated to global warming. This is likely to be an incorrect assumption, as the ocean has become considerably warmer recently. Another factor is the weakening of the jet stream which is clearly tied to the Arctic warming faster than the equator. (The jet stream is driven by tempertature differences, much more than by their absolute value for any small change.)

OTOH, you're never going to prove that any one particular weather, or even seasonal, change is tied to climate. There's too much variation. Climate is basically a mean of several years weather, and there's not even an agreement over how many years should go into calculating the mean. (Of course that's arguing about words rather than about physical happenings, but people are good at that.)

Droughts = Cold

[PortHaven]

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.

Re:Droughts = Cold

[rwa2]

Plus, if it was legitimate AGW, the Earth would have natural ways to shut the whole thing down.

Re:Droughts = Cold

[thaylin]

Actually, that is not even remotely correct. Deserts, and droughts, in cali are caused by cold ocean currents that drive rain elsewhere and the rainshadow effect. It is an odd double wammy with 2 the 3 deserts causing effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

It has nothing to do with global cooling, however warming does make it worse because warmer air can hold more mositure and thus takes longer to saturate to the point of rainfall.

The otehr cause of the deserts being the land is too far inland for the moisture to consistently make it there.

Sucks for farmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Here I am sitting in shorts and a t-shit while the rest of the country is shoveling snow off of their sidewalks.

It's been great for recreation but about once a week I ride up over the dam that contains the artificial Shasta Lake that is the source of Cali's main waterway, the Sacramento river. It's low. Really low. Worse, the snowpacks that feed it would not even be back to normal without five or six years of what's considered normal precipitation.

Stil, that's not the real problem. The real problem is almost entirely political.

We've been through more water scares than any other state in the nation. Back in the 70s and 80s the population centers have done the water rationing dance and per-person use is quite low compared to what it was. We can't squeeze any more water savings there.

Agriculture uses 75% of the water in california (Yes far more than municipal and industrial COMBINED), and the distribution of such is just plain fucked up. 100 year old water rights agreements let certain farmers suck the water dry in a manner that is neither fair nor efficient. We can grow plenty here with much less water that's currently being used. But we can't because of a fucked-up love triangle between rural farmers, rural politicians, and agreements that were signed more than a century ago - A time when you could drain a lake or divert a river and nobody would blink because water was plentiful and concern for the environment was everyone's last priority.

It gets weirder still.

Turns out much of the water in this state also comes from only recently understood vast underground aquifers.. And they're drying up. Turns our recent legal precedent lets management of underground aquifers trump water rights agreements if said aquifers are affected by water consumption.. So there's an end run around these ancient laws that are causing problems.

Re:Sucks for farmers

[Vegan Cyclist]

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

Been There Done That.

[Anonymous Coward]

CA has experienced droughts worse than this in the past.

News for ya, CA is mostly a desert.

Re:Been There Done That.

[Hussman32]

If you RTA linked above, it discusses multiple droughts of durations varying from 10 to 20 years within the last 1,000 years, well within our current 10,000 warm period. These droughts occurred since, for example, the establishment of Heidelberg University, but after the establishment of the Farmer's Almanac.

Re:Isn't this a bit obvious...

[MightyMartian]

Weather != Climate

Re:a whole 130 years of data

[Kernel Kurtz]

California drought: Past dry periods have lasted more than 200 years, scientists say....

http://www.mercurynews.com/sci...

Different scientists, different answers. There is something for everyone.

Watch your wording in the summary!!!

[BCGlorfindel]

Watch how you word your summary of a scientific finding. In particular when the summary states:
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.
You shouldn't go to read the linked article and find the conclusions of the study state:
Our results suggest that anthropogenic warming has increased the probability of the co-occurring temperature and precipitation conditions that have historically led to drought in California.

The header, California's Hot, Dry Winters Tied To Climate Change fit the study. The start of the summary mdsolar sends word that hot dry winters may be the norm in the future for California fit the study. Resist the urge to overreach with the extra statement trying to sound like scientists have claimed proof that the drought is definitively the end result of AGW and naught else. Why? Because the scientists didn't say it, and they most likely didn't say it because they don't want to say something so stupid. Obviously draught is a part of the natural cycle in California without the benefit of AGW, no scientist is gonna be eager to declare that only AGW is responsible. Instead you will see the conclusion they ACTUALLY USED in the article noting instead that AGW absolutely contributed to, rather than definitively caused, the drought.

The difference between contributing to and worsening droughts and being the sole or dominant cause MATTERS.

Five Things To Consider

[WillAffleckUW]

1. California is always a semi-desert, with the exception of the northern fifth of the state, which is a rainforest. Adapt or die, b*tc*s. Yes, that means sustainable crop practices.

2. You're not getting any extra power from Oregon or Washington this year, cause our snowpack is around 8 percent of what it normally has been (which will be the norm in 2025 due to global warming, by the way, but is not directly caused by that). So we need our water to sell bottled water to you idiots who fail to realize the fancy water you drink in plastic bottles is just our usual drinking water in Seattle that we let settle a bit so it's "fresh". No cheap electricity for you. Grow a pair and build more solar and wind, cause it's just going to get much much much much worse.

3. As to crop practices, do what British Columbia learned in the 1970s and 1980s. You've had 50 years to adapt. Mix crops (no monoculture), grow crop cover between tree rows (less soil loss, less water loss) which also fixes nitrogen and can kill bad bugs. Cover your dam water canals (hint: try using solar panels, win win) to reduce water evaporation. It's been done in other places in North America for a long time, cheap water is over.

4. Most of your water use and water waste is farming. Most of that is because you insist on growing artificially subsidized water intensive crops that aren't suited for your climate. Stop subsidizing those and let the market self correct that very very bad choice. Adapt.

5. There is no all or nothing artificial choice. Half measures are better than no measures. Small and moderate adaptations now, or even to partial removal of subsidies and misuse have major impacts. Try changing 1/10th of your crops to better methods. I drove thru almost all of Cali this past winter, you really haven't done much, and you could easily adapt without much of a problem, but you have to stop sticking your heads in the sands.

Re:Five Things To Consider

[Scorch_Mechanic]

Actually, the state legislature passed some bills to regulate the drilling of wells and the pumping of groundwater back in August.

Amusingly, people have been conserving water so much locally that the water utilities are actually running out of money, they say, to maintain infrastructure. The article barely touches on it, but the Santa Clara Water District (termed affectionately by a local columnist as the "Golden Spigot") doesn't exactly have a record of sound spending. Hopefully this will bite them on the ass.

Re:What "historical predictions"?

[0dugo0]

Go ahead, return to sender, but sticking fingers in your ears whilst singing LALALA doesn't make it a good idea to keep using the atmosphere as dumping ground.

Re:Climate?

[next_ghost]

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.

Re:Isn't this a bit obvious...

[dywolf]

Ignoring your rather simplistic (and wrong) view of science and weather, I'll just say this: California is an easier case to investigate.

Other states are much more dependent on rainfall for their water, and those rain patterns come from many sources. Such as plains states getting systems out of the Rockies, up from the Gulf, down from the Arctic, and even occasionally from the eastern seaboard if a big hurricane or nor'easter rolls in.

But California is different. It's not reliant on multiple sources and patterns for its water supply, and it isn't actually very reliant on rain fall throughout the year.
Rather, the majority of California's water supply comes from one predictable source, the Sierra snowpack, in a predictable yearly cycle.

In Cali the snowpack is refreshed every Winter between (roughly) mid-December and April 1st by moisture laden air coming in off the ocean. That snow then melts through the rest of the year, supplying the state with the overwhelming majority of its water.

So while droughts in general are increasing and that is in general attributed to warming, the variability of the weather patterns that supply various areas of the country make pinpointing the source of particular droughts difficult. But because California's cycle is much simpler the backtracking of causes and effects becomes much easier.

And while the winter weather patterns have been there, the air has been dry, unusually dry, leading to almost no snowfall, leading to this horrible drought. So while the state is a very dry state in terms of rainfall and precipitation, the abundance of the snowpack meant they could overcome that and still be able to sustain much agriculture because people are good at engineering and building irrigation canals.

California is rightly proud of the efficacy of its statewide irrigation system (we can debate the pros and cons of the system and its impact on nature and people all day long, but as far getting water to crops, it does its job very well). But that system is still ultimately dependent on the snowpack.

Re:Isn't this a bit obvious...

[HiThere]

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.

Re:Evidence indicates otherwise

[ganjadude]

suvs are not what they used to be. many have over 30 MPG now a days. while you are correct. fuel use is still down

Re:Evidence indicates otherwise

[ganjadude]

the main cause of the drop is the middle east trying to push the shale oil companies out of business

Trends can take time to reverse

[Firethorn]

Exactly. There's 'inertia' to consider as well.

IE if gasoline is high enough, long enough, lots of people buy fuel efficient vehicles. They don't instantly dispose of them just because oil(and gasoline) prices subsequently drop.

If you 'suddenly' increase the price of water for one year, the farmers will grumble and pay for it. Some will go out of business, but that happens whenever you increase the price of something, or even don't decrease it fast enough. Some farmers just aren't good businessmen.

If you go, okay, now it's $1 per 100k liters(1/2 the price British Columbia recently started charging), while telling them that the price is going to double each year for the next 10 years, they'll start adjusting how they do business.

We know that there are wasteful watering methods that lose over half the water used to evaporation before it hits the plants. We also know there are systems where the only water lost is pretty much confined to the food products you take out of the specialized recycling greenhouses.

The trick is to get the farmers to use a sustainable amount of water. Even just burying seep lines can drop usage by over 75% over daytime spray irrigation.

Re:Evidence indicates otherwise

[DigiShaman]

2010 Toyota V6 RAV4 here. Rated 19 city / 27 Hwy. (4 cylinder is rated for 22 city / 28 Hwy). At best, if I remain under 60Mph, I can hold 32 MPG with cruise control. Though for be past year driving, my average MPG driving around Houston has been 24 MPG. That 30 MPG while doable, is under the best of conditions with no stop-and-go traffic and flat terrain. And while a hybrid will make that figure more reasonable, the ROI for paying the extra delta coast for the feature is most likely longer than 10 years anyways; which may not be worth it unless you either plan on keeping the car that long, or gas prices more than double.