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

Models compared to reality

[Anonymous Coward]

Models compared with reality.

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.

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.

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: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?

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: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