NOAA: Climate change didn’t cause drought
By Tim McDonnell, Mother Jones
California is in the middle of a really bad three-year drought that stretches across nearly the entire state. The drought has already wreaked havoc with the state’s agricultural sector, is expected to take a $2.2 billion bite out of the state’s economy this year alone, and shows no sign of relenting anytime soon.
Climate scientists have warned for years that rising greenhouse gas concentrations will lead to more frequent and severe droughts in many parts of the world. Although it’s generally difficult to attribute any one weather event to the broader global warming trend, over the last couple of years a body of research has emerged to assess the link between man-made climate change and the current California drought. There are signs that rising temperatures (so far, 2014 is the hottest year on record both for California and globally) and long-term declines in soil moisture, both linked to greenhouse gas emissions, may have made the impact of the drought worse.
But according to research by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California’s drought was primarily produced by a lack of precipitation driven by natural atmospheric cycles that are unrelated to man-made climate change. In other words, climate change may have worsened the impacts of the drought, but it isn’t the underlying cause.
I would suggest that NOAA and Tim McDonnell contact UC Santa Cruz Professor Lisa Sloan. Her climate based computer simulations on the loss of Arctic Sea ice predicted a loss of rain and snow in the West back in 2004.
Plus, with nothing much better to do, Lisa will be delighted to hear from us.
But according to research by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California’s drought was primarily produced by a lack of precipitation driven by natural atmospheric cycles that are unrelated to man-made climate change.
Genius!! Nothing get’s past them!
Written records of precipitation have been kept for northern CA for over 150 years, and evidence, such as tree rings, goes back for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years. The current drought is well within normal variation in recent years — droughts up to six years duration have happened in recent decades. As the article pointed out, this doesn’t mean climate change was not involved, or will not be involved, but again, this drought can be completely accounted for as being part of normal variation.
x (units of time) of _____ data are used to define y unit(s) of climate.