Texas finally received rain over the first weekend in October.  But as the Drought Monitor shows, while the portion of the state under exceptional drought has dropped a little, 99% of the state is still under severe drought, just as it was last week.

The L.A. Times reported:

Texas has finally received some rain, but the weekend deluge has yet to make a dent in the yearlong drought that weather experts say could last a decade.

Some cities set daily rainfall records last weekend, prompting flash-flood warnings, including Waco, which received 5.83 inches of rain Sunday. Houston, in the midst of its driest year and after enduring its hottest summer on record, received 5.11 inches of rain, another daily record. Dallas got 1.37 inches.

Deluges are not the ideal solution to a drought because of the possibility of flash floods and massive runoff.  What’s needed is slow but steady rain.  Unfortunately, global warming pushes the extremes in both drought and deluge.

UPDATE:  Coincidentally (or not), while I was writing this post, Lubbock was hit by a monster dust storm.  Here’s one amazing video (via NY Times) and another is at the end:

A fearsome dust storm whipped through the Panhandle and South Plains of Texas on Monday with wind gusts up to 75 miles an hour in some places….  the monstrous cloud wrapped the city of Lubbock in darkness shortly before 6 p.m.

Tim Oram, a meteorologist at the weather service, said that in Lubbock, the cloud of dust whisked from the ground stretched up to 8,000 feet high and caused zero visibility brown-outs in some places.

“To get to zero visibility, that’s pretty thick,” Mr. Oram said. “That’s what made this one probably a little unusual.”

For background, see USGS on Dust-Bowlification: Drier conditions projected to accelerate dust storms in the U.S. Southwest (which has stunning videos of dust storms in Australia) and NBC: “The Dust Storm that Swallowed Up an American City” (which has stunning videos of this summer’s monster dust storm in Phoenix).

I reported several weeks ago that state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon had predicted: “I’ve started telling anyone who’s interested that it’s likely that much of Texas will still be in severe drought this time next summer, with water supply implications even worse than those we are now experiencing.”

More recently, he did an analysis suggesting the drought could last a decade, which made headlines, but more recently he modified that to “I’d guess the odds that this drought will last five years are only about 25%”:

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In one of his most unhinged rants yet, hate radio show host Rush Limbaugh argued that the revelation that a famous book about multiple-personality disorder is a hoax means that “nothing is real,” including global warming. “Sybil” was an influential 1973 book written for a popular audience that told of a psychiatrist’s client with “multiple personality disorder.” The book influenced the field of psychoanalysis for years. By the 1990s, questions were raised about the veracity of the tale, and a new book by Debbie Nathan, Sybil Exposed, fully debunks the story, after thousands of people were mistreated.

In today’s show, Limbaugh took this news to mean that all institutions are part of a global “liberal” conspiracy, including climate science:

So here we have a real-life recent case of an agenda-driven hoax becoming scientific consensus and a popularly accepted concept that real decisions were based on. Sound familiar? Sound familiar, folks? Does it not sound exactly like what’s happened with global warming?

“The United States Congress, the White House, you name it, wherever they have dominated for a significant amount of time, you have perverse corruption, lies, outright fraud and hoaxes all for the express purpose of controlling people, all because they want to control everybody,” Limbaugh concluded. “Now, who do you think is in charge of this stupid Occupy Wall Street thing? The same bunch of fraudsters, the same bunch of liars, the same bunch of hoaxers. Nothing is real.”

Limbaugh is engaging in a fallacy common among climate deniers, the belief that climate science totters like an upside-down pyramid on a few key observations or influential scientists. In reality, the science of manmade global warming is a robust accumulation of knowledge from diverse fields, from molecular chemistry to ecological biology, from satellite-based atmospheric physics to paleoclimatology.

Limbaugh wants his listeners to believe that the 99 percent movement — which has now gone global — is part of a conspiracy of “perverse corruption” and “outright fraud.” Limbaugh has claimed, without evidence, that “Obama’s responsible” for the movement, fed by “George Soros money” and “organized and paid for by a bunch of anti-Semites.” It’s not clear what the connection is between this supposed conspiracy, climate scientists, and a psychiatrist who’s been dead for nearly twenty years.