US battles epic drought, little relief in sight - Agence France-Presse
- “Los Angeles recorded just 8.15 centimeters (3.21 inches) of rain in the year to June 30, making it the driest year on record since 1877. The city draws half its water from the Sierra Nevada mountains, which have provided only around 20 percent of normal levels.”
- “The worst hit is the southeastern state of Georgia, that is largely under level four, or “extreme” drought. Officials say this is the worst drought the state has experienced since 1892, if not in history.”
- Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue: “Drought is a natural disaster, and we are experiencing the single worst drought on Georgia’s history. On top of that, we are mired in a man-made disaster of federal bureaucracy.” Yet neither he nor the reporter acknowledge even the possibility that climate change is making these kind of droughts more likely and more intense.
MPs call for ‘super department’ on climate change – The Independent. “The MPs called for the appointment of a cross-departmental Climate Change Minister who would regularly attend Cabinet meetings to drive Government policy on the issue…. The committee also backed the establishment of a new Whitehall body — the Climate Change and Energy secretariat, based in the Cabinet Office — to co-ordinate the fight against global warming.”
Power Revolution - U.S. News and World Report. A long article with shorter summaries of our current and future energy menu, including technologies only now starting to get media attention like concentrated solar and geothermal.
Carbon partnership hopes to go global – Reuters. “A coalition of European countries, U.S. states, Canadian provinces and New Zealand signed a partnership on Monday to slow global warming through an international carbon trading market.”
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Joe,
How could you miss John Christy’s Nobel Moment into today’s WSJ? After last week’s wildfires & more Santa Anas forecast for this weekend, we desperately need some comic relief here in SoCal, not more denial & delay.
I usually don’t read the funnies.
Joe,
Are you calling the Wall Street Journal “the funnies” or are you dissing Dr. Christy?
I mentioned the Christy story the other day , but you didn’t reply. I was thinking that maybe it was because it might be a bit tricky for you to call Dr. Christy a nut or a “DDDenier” since he is one of the main authors of the IPCC report and one of the few real scientists involved in that boondoggle. But the fact is he IS a denier of sorts, isn’t he? What do you make of that?
Dr. Christy is a world-renowned climatologist, unlike you, and he doesn’t believe the hype. That is very significant.
From the article Ivan kindly linked -
—–”I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never “proof”) and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.
There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don’t find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming — around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)
It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system’s behavior over the next five days.
Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in those we-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, “Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with ‘At our present level of ignorance, we think we know . . .’”
I haven’t seen that type of climate humility lately. Rather I see jump-to-conclusions advocates and, unfortunately, some scientists who see in every weather anomaly the specter of a global-warming apocalypse. Explaining each successive phenomenon as a result of human action gives them comfort and an easy answer.
Others of us scratch our heads and try to understand the real causes behind what we see. We discount the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we’ve seen the climate do has happened before.”—–
I have talked about this previously and feel at least somewhat vindicated to hear Dr. Christy saying some very similar things. You never took me seriously before, because like you I’m not a climatologist, but what do you think now that a real climatologist, one of the principal IPCC scientists and Nobel winner, has stated publicly that the AGW hypothesis is greatly overrated?
You have also tried to link global warming to wildfires (and even to the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis!) but what does Christy say?
—–”For instance, hasn’t global warming led to the five-year drought and fires in the U.S. Southwest?
Not necessarily.
There has been a drought, but it would be a stretch to link this drought to carbon dioxide. If you look at the 1,000-year climate record for the western U.S. you will see not five-year but 50-year-long droughts. The 12th and 13th centuries were particularly dry. The inconvenient truth is that the last century has been fairly benign in the American West. A return to the region’s long-term “normal” climate would present huge challenges for urban planners.”—–
Will you now persist in saying that the so-called ‘reality of global warming’ is worse than the predictions of the IPCC? Or will hearing from a real climatologist make you stop and think?
Dr. Christy is ashamed to be linked with Al Gore, it seems, and I don’t blame him. Will you now continue the same sky-is-falling warm mongering?
Also, two more quick questions – In your swell book you you assert that we need to build 1,000,000 wind turbines and 700 new nuclear plants over the next 10 years to combat manmade global warming. Is that just in the U.S. or worldwide? And how the Hell would we pay for them?
Maybe you and Dr. Christy could have a debate. That would be fun.
Ron — I know this comes as a shock to you, but the purpose of this website is not to answer every single one of your denial-oriented questions.
Yes I am dissing the WSJ ed page (duh) and Christy. Christy made so many mistakes in his misguided effort to prove the satellite temperature data did not conform with the ground data that it is hard to take him seriously.
But you should ignore any Denier/Delayer who just keeps trying to confuse the public by ignoring the well-known distinction between weather and climate: “It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system’s behavior over the next five days.”
This is tiresome. We can’t project accurately at all what the temperature will be in January 15 at 1 pm (weather) but we can project with very high accuracy what the average temperature for the month of January will be (climate).
It is Al Gore who does not deserve to be linked to Christy.
I’m glad you liked my book. If you had read it a bit closer, you would know that such facilities need to be built over 50 years worldwide. They get paid for the way we pay for all power plants — somebody thinks they can make money selling electricity. Obviously, if there is no price for carbon dioxide, you won’t see such levels of construction for zero-carbon power sources.
Joe,
You can’t just go on and on calling everyone who disagrees with you a nut, especially scientists, and especially climatologists with the stature of John Christy. At some point you are going to have to come to terms with the facts that the AGW hypothesis is weak, the science of climatology is in its infancy, and there is no ‘consensus’. If you don’t, you are going to lose your audience and that is the death knell for a propaganda campaign.
Honesty and principle really do matter, in politics, in everyday life, and in science. Deal with it.
I didn’t call him a nut. But anyone who has been as consistently wrong as he has — and who intentionally makes misleading arguments to confuse the public — deserves to be ignored.
But Joe, he’s one of the principal authors of the IPCC report, one of the few real climatologists that didn’t have his name removed from the report in protest.
You need him.
I have debated him — so I can assure you that he is not “needed” in the climate debate.