Widespread annual droughts, once a rare calamity....
Posted on 08/12/2012 5:20:07 PM PDT by Sub-Driver
Hundred-Year Forecast: Drought By CHRISTOPHER R. SCHWALM, CHRISTOPHER A. WILLIAMS and KEVIN SCHAEFER
BY many measurements, this summer’s drought is one for the record books. But so was last year’s drought in the South Central states. And it has been only a decade since an extreme five-year drought hit the American West. Widespread annual droughts, once a rare calamity, have become more frequent and are set to become the “new normal.”
Until recently, many scientists spoke of climate change mainly as a “threat,” sometime in the future. But it is increasingly clear that we already live in the era of human-induced climate change, with a growing frequency of weather and climate extremes like heat waves, droughts, floods and fires.
Future precipitation trends, based on climate model projections for the coming fifth assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicate that droughts of this length and severity will be commonplace through the end of the century unless human-induced carbon emissions are significantly reduced. Indeed, assuming business as usual, each of the next 80 years in the American West is expected to see less rainfall than the average of the five years of the drought that hit the region from 2000 to 2004.
That extreme drought (which we have analyzed in a new study in the journal Nature-Geoscience) had profound consequences for carbon sequestration, agricultural productivity and water resources: plants, for example, took in only half the carbon dioxide they do normally, thanks to a drought-induced drop in photosynthesis.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Bzzzzt, wrong. Droughts start and end naturally. The most that warming will do is create slightly higher high temperatures. The problem with the models is that they predict whatever the modelers want them to predict since they do not model weather and can't model or predict shifts in the weather.
God will hold the rains and punish us with drought until Obama is out of office and in prison.
If the NYT sez so, I’m shorting water rights.
BS warning.
As Texans know, there is no “normal” year in the Lone Star State. No one can forecast what next season’s weather will bring, much less what the climate will be in the next millennium. Only fools with an agenda try to divine such things.
Maybe he has casement windows in his house, which would have a crank ( or winder)(long ‘i’) to open and close the window.
In other words a window winder.
“with a growing frequency of weather and climate extremes like heat waves, droughts, floods and fires. “
I didn’t know “fire” was a climate extreme.
Duuuhhh! Liars figure. The 100 year drought in Texas was last year. Then we had a pretty normal winter, then it turned very dry again. It is the Sun stupid. Just came out of the longest and quietest sunspot minimum in my lifetime. Yes, weather is more variable, but the sky is not truly falling. Just Chicken Little Liars at Work.
Are these the same guys who predicted “20 Years” of more extreme hurricane weather after Katrina?
Yeah. Where’s my grain of salt?
>>>Future precipitation trends, based on climate model projections for the coming fifth assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicate that droughts of this length and severity will be commonplace through the end of the century unless human-induced carbon emissions are significantly reduced.<<<
I’ve read that California and the Southwest experienced about a century of drought in the 1300s and 1400s. Some think that’s the reason for the obliteration of the corn-growing pueblo cultures in the Southwest, too.
So very long droughts have been commonplace in the recent past.
Before that, during the Ice Age, rainfall and snowmelt was frequent enough in the same area to produce many large lakes, filled with trout, and widespread forest.
The question I always have for these folks is this: What’s the perfect climate? What’s the moment when you’ll say, “Eureka! We’re here!” If global warming is a problem, and global cooling is the solution, what’s the point at which we can stop mitigating the disaster?
As the left used to say to GW Bush, “What’s your exit strategy?”
I’d say throw this sh*t back in their faces. Ask them to describe their goal, in detail, down the degree, including descriptions of the kinds of climates for each geographical region of the Earth. If they’re concerned about the climate of the Arctic (to use a place where I live now), ask them to describe what it looks like when we arrive.
Of course, climate has been so variable up here in Alaska during the past 20,000 years that there is no reasonable answer. How about the moment 5,000 years ago when there were forests on the Seward Peninsula? How about the moment 18,000 years ago when the spruce trees outside my office window was grassland and sand dunes?
We’ll never get past this issue without directly addressing the emptiness of their propositions.
And speaking personally, I would love to grow apples on the shores of the Yukon up here. What’s wrong with that?
And, we now know that warmer summers do not create droughts.
I want the kind of weather they sing about in Camelot. :-)
Those who buy into the cult of alGore have the gravitas to believe humans can significantly affect Mother Nature. I laugh at their gravitas. The planet was here before the human race and will be here after us.
Man can not control what he did not create. Period.
Widespread annual droughts, once a rare calamity....
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