Denier weirdness in Las Vegas, and WUWT wages war on clean energy in California

This comment can be seen at WUWT today, under another article by Eric Worrall (archived here). (Eric was protesting California's intent to modernise the energy sector. He prefers smog and dangerous climate change.)

Before I post the comment, you may have read how Las Vegas has joined other cities in the USA and shifted to 100% renewables, which is is expected to save the city an annual $5 million in operating costs. It's the city that's shifted, not all of the strip. On the official Las Vegas blog, it was announced that:

This morning, Mayor Carolyn G. Goodman and NV Energy Senior Vice President of Customer Operations Pat Egan announced that we are the first large city in the country and one of the first major customers in Nevada to be served exclusively with renewable energy. We are now one of the few cities of the world that can say all the power we use comes from a green source.  In partnership with NV Energy, every streetlight, city park, community center, fire station, service yard and public building owned by the city, totaling 140 facilities, will be 100 percent powered by renewable energy.

All the power used by the city itself now comes exclusively from renewable energy. While that doesn't mean that all the power used on the strip or in households come from renewable energy, it's a big step forward. On Snopes, it was pointed out that some businesses on the strip are following suit because it makes good business sense.

Anthony Watts protests the California drought

Anthony Watts has another "claim" article at WUWT (archived here). This time it's about the extreme drought afflicting his home state of California. Anthony seems to think it's not so bad. He'd not find too many people who would agree. He didn't actually commit himself to a position other than the dogwhistle "claim" in his headline. He wrote up top:

Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford is a well-known source of papers claiming alarming things about weather and climate. He churns out a paper about 2-3 times a year, with the typical bent of climate change is causing “X”. This one is no different. 

Anthony's wrong as usual. Dr Diffenbaugh has a lot more than 2 or 3 papers published each year. Last year Google Scholar shows he had thirteen papers published.

El Nino, the California drought and Sierra Nevada Snow

Yesterday Anthony Watts wrote one of his rare articles about the drought in his home state of California (archived here). His headline read: "Drought buster? Up to 10 feet of snow this week for California’s Sierra Nevada". Under the headline he wrote (my emphasis):

Here is some good news for drought-stricken California; the latest forecast model output from WeatherBell suggests that the Sierra Nevada snow-pack will get a fresh dump of up to 10 feet of snow. 

He posted the chart below, with a scale up to 48 inches from the look of it, not 120 inches (though the scale doesn't indicate units). Up the top it states "Maximum 147.6 in". (Click to enlarge it).

Source: WUWT

His prediction of ten feet of snow this week struck me as rather a lot in just a few days. Not knowing how quickly snow can build up in the region I did some research. "This should hit the headlines", I thought to myself. However the only news I could find on the Sierra Nevada snowpack were about how up to "2 feet of fresh snow are expected to fall this week in the Sierra Nevada's highest points" (Associated Press in the Sacramento Bee - 3 January 2015). That's eight feet short of Anthony's ten feet prediction.

What denier blogs won't talk about - California fires

One of the most striking signs of climate science denial is what you read on denier blogs during major events. Or rather, what you don't read. Anthony Watts lives in Chico California. In his home state at the moment, all you will read about, and if what we experience in Australia is any indication, all you'll see on television and hear on the radio are reports of the devastating fires. But not on the "most read" climate conspiracy blog in California, WUWT. Not a word.

Visit the website of the LA Times and read the stories, made all the more heartbreaking by the matter of fact manner in which the reports are written.

Anthony Watts claims a scientist ignored his own work on US droughts

Anthony Watts latest claim (archived here, latest here) is that a scientist ignored his own research. At Anthony's climate conspiracy blog today, he copied and pasted a press release about a new paper on the Californian drought. Anthony wrote his article under the headline "Ridiculous claim from Columbia University: ‘Warming climate is deepening California drought". He thinks that it's ridiculous to think that evaporation will be higher under hotter conditions. He doesn't understand the basics of science at all. He also wrote:

From the THE EARTH INSTITUTE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY and the department of “intense droughts only occur in the age of the SUV” department, where they apparently failed to take the climatic history of the region into account:

And he put up a chart that he claimed came from from one of the authors of the new paper (though Anthony clearly didn't know that), in an attempt to dismiss this new work. In any case, it didn't. His graphic wasn't in the 2007 paper and the graphic didn't refute the new paper:

Stop the presses! Anthony Watts has mentioned the Californian drought - then does a Tisdale

OMG! Anthony Watts has mentioned the Californian drought (archived here). You know, the one plaguing his home state. True, the mention was buried in an article he wrote about El Niño. Still, it's worth celebrating. So what I've done is put together an animation of California drought status, starting in July 2006. I've put in the charts from US Drought Monitor for July and December - that is, two per year in July and December, from 2006 through to the latest chart in July 2015:

To put this momentous event (Anthony mentioning the drought) into perspective, here are some facts and figures from the animation and the US Drought Monitor archives:

Wildfires add to atmospheric CO2: A lesson for Australia from California

There still isn't a lot happening in deniersville. Anthony Watts and his readers are gloating that their campaigns against climate science are having an effect. Well, Anthony doesn't actually admit that denier smear campaigns might be giving graduates second thoughts about doing research in climate - however, he and his denier friends are clearly delighted to hear that some conference in India didn't get enough papers to go ahead. Or so they say. (Archived here.)

Meanwhile, there are lots and lots of scientists beavering away expanding our understanding of the climate and the earth and all its systems.

Just one more example: Anthony hasn't mentioned this new paper about his home state, California. It's from a team led by Patrick Gonzalez, of the U.S. National Park Service. The scientists found that wildfires (and deforestation) are contributing quite a bit more to greenhouse emissions than previously known.

The Californian drought is the worst in 1,200 years

According to research carried out by Daniel Griffin from the University of Minnesota and Kevin Anchukaitis from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the current drought in California is the worst in at least 1,200 years.

Here is the latest drought update for California from the US Drought Monitor, which wouldn't include the recent rain. It's for the 2 December - four days ago.

Source: US Drought Monitor

From what I read, it will take quite a bit more than this week's downpours to lift California out of its drought.

Finally - another WUWT article on the drought in California

Maybe the niggling from here has paid off. Anthony Watts has finally posted another article on the California drought. Well, WUWT has mentioned it a couple of times before already, in an article about Daniel Swain's recent research paper, and back in January this year, when he proclaimed it had nothing to do with global warming.

Today he's wanting to downplay it again in an article by Robert Moore (archived here).  He's not downplaying it quite so much this time. The top lot of images he's used don't help his argument much. It shows how the drought emerged over the past 3 years. Here's what it looks like now - a very small improvement from the worst of it three months ago (click to enlarge):

Source: US Drought Monitor

Human influence on the Californian drought

A much more acute situation

Daniel Swain and Noah Diffenbaugh and colleagues have been looking at the current drought in California to see if global warming has played a part. Earlier this year, their work was reported by Stanford:

The current drought is different from many of California's previous droughts. For example, the state's last major dry spell occurred in the early 1990s and was characterized by below-average amounts of rain and snowfall for several years.

"That's what we typically think of when we think of drought – a few years when precipitation is below normal. We don't conceptualize that the precipitation would just shut off," Swain said. "That's what's so remarkable about this drought. It's not a multi-year drought that's getting progressively worse as the years go by. It's that it has barely rained at all this year. That's a much more acute situation in a lot of ways."

Source: US Drought Monitor
(Click image to enlarge it.)

Three times more likely now than before industrialisation

Daniel Swain coined the term "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge" or Triple R, to describe the large region of high atmospheric pressure that's preventing rains from getting to California and is causing the current drought. Results from their work have recently been published in a special supplement to this month's issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS). It turns out that the conditions causing the current drought are three times more likely to occur with global warming than without.

Next surfing hotspot - the Arctic Ocean, plus record drought in California

A couple of items to whet your appetite for the end of week fare.

Big waves in the Arctic

Off to surf the Arctic

There have been record high waves in the Arctic, which will probably make the ice disappear more quickly in coming years. Back in September 2012, scientists measured waves of five metres or 16 feet. Maybe that's not quite enough to attract surfers from Bell's Beach, yet it's a lot more wave action than there used to be.


With the ice retreating further and further from the shores, the waves are able to grow bigger and bigger. It's suggested that these bigger waves will churn up ice and hasten its demise. Less ice means more waves - a feedback loop. While bigger waves might be great news for surfers, it will make it harder for shipping and will also exacerbate shoreline erosion. From ScienceDaily.com:

Arctic ice used to retreat less than 100 miles from the shore. In 2012, it retreated more than 1,000 miles. Wind blowing across an expanse of water for a long time creates whitecaps, then small waves, which then slowly consolidate into big swells that carry huge amounts of energy in a single punch.

The size of the waves increases with the fetch, or travel distance over open water. So more open water means bigger waves. As waves grow bigger they also catch more wind, driving them faster and with more energy.

Shipping and oil companies have been eyeing the opportunity of an ice-free season in the Arctic Ocean. The emergence of big waves in the Arctic could be bad news for operating in newly ice-free Northern waters.

"Almost all of the casualties and losses at sea are because of stormy conditions, and breaking waves are often the culprit," Thomson said.

It also could be a new feedback loop leading to more open water as bigger waves break up the remaining summer ice floes.

"The melting has been going on for decades. What we're talking about with the waves is potentially a new process, a mechanical process, in which the waves can push and pull and crash to break up the ice," Thomson said.

Waves breaking on the shore could also affect the coastlines, where melting permafrost is already making shores more vulnerable to erosion.

The observations were made as part of a bigger project by a sensor anchored to the seafloor and sitting 50 meters (more than 150 feet) below the surface in the middle of the Beaufort Sea, about 350 miles off Alaska's north slope and at the middle of the ice-free summer water. It measured wave height from mid-August until late October 2012.

Jim Thomson and Erick Rogers have written a paper about this (open access). You can read it here, or read about it at ScienceDaily.com.

Extreme drought in California

The other bit of news this week was that while drought conditions are improving in some parts of the USA, they are getting much worse in California. 58.4% of California is now in extreme drought.

Source: The National Drought Mitigation Centre

Funnily enough Anthony Watts, who hails from California, hasn't written about it on his blog. In fact for all his moaning about manners, he is scorning the suffering that the drought is bringing to farmers and others in his home state. He tweeted "and that's nothing that the state has not experienced before".

By some measures the state may not have experienced a drought like this one before, at least not as part of the USA. The megadroughts happened well before there ever was a US state of California. It only formally became part of the United States in 1850.

Back in Australia, Queensland isn't faring too well at the moment, either. This is the latest map I could find, from May this year:

Source: The Long Paddock, Qld Government

Meanwhile south of the Queensland border, fires have been busting out early in NSW.

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Jim Thomson, W. Erick Rogers. "Swell and sea in the emerging Arctic Ocean". Geophysical Research Letters, 2014; 41 (9): 3136 DOI: 10.1002/2014GL059983

Finally, if a "bit too late" - Anthony Watts talks about the drought in California

Many people will know that parts of the western USA are in the throes of a serious drought.  The dry conditions over parts of western USA have been mentioned here on HotWhopper a few times (eg here and here and here) and it's been all over the internet.

Finally Anthony Watts has written about it (archived here).  This is after the Governor of California has declared a drought emergency - while a wildfire raged in southern California during the heart of winter.

Perhaps Anthony felt he had to pre-empt suggestions that the record drought was associated with global warming, now that the news of it has spread far and wide.  He wrote:

And the cause of this? Certainly not “global warming” though I’m sure the activist idiots will use every trick in the book to try to create a linkage. The cause is a the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and a weak to neutral and persistent La Niña pattern that some are calling “La Nada”.

I don't know how Anthony is so sure of himself.  He doesn't cite any research on the subject.  Here is some relevant research which he could have cited, from the IPCC AR5 WG1 report (my bold italics):

Recent long-term droughts in western North America cannot definitively be shown to lie outside the very large envelope of natural precipitation variability in this region (Cayan et al., 2010; Seager et al., 2010), particularly given new evidence of the history of high-magnitude natural drought and pluvial episodes suggested by palaeoclimatic reconstructions (see Chapter 5). Low-frequency tropical ocean temperature anomalies in all ocean basins appear to force circulation changes that promote regional drought (Hoerling and Kumar, 2003; Seager et al., 2005; Dai, 2011). Uniform increases in SST are not particularly effective in this regard (Schubert et al., 2009; Hoerling et al., 2012). Therefore, the reliable separation of natural variability and forced climate change will require simulations that accurately reproduce changes in largescale SST gradients at all time scales.

So at present, the drought may or may not be exacerbated or precipitated by global warming, but that cannot be definitively demonstrated at present. Anthony is wrong to be so sure of himself.  In any case, all weather these days is affected by global warming.  If there wasn't this amount of energy in the system, weather would be different to what it is.  Whatever the weather, it's against the background of the warmer world.

For example, there is this research I've mentioned before from Schwalm et al (2012) in Nature Geoscience:

Figure 4b Normalized CMIP5 summer precipitation from 1900 to 2100, five-year mean. Horizontal line denotes the turn of the century drought severity. Red and blue shading shows dryness more or less severe, respectively, than the turn of the century drought. Arrows indicate the turn of the century drought. Source: Schwalm12

A bit too late...

Anthony has a lot of cheek, too.  He wrote (my bold italics):

Yesterday, Governor Brown declared a drought emergency, which is probably a bit too late. 

I don't know what Anthony meant by "a bit too late".  But what struck me was that Anthony's article could equally well be described as "a bit too late".  AFAIK this is the first time he's mentioned it at WUWT.  And remember when last year he replied to a tweet by Peter Gleick about the California drought with: "Big F*&ing Deal" - "it's happened before" - meaning "so what!".

Anyway, he's finally changing his tune and acknowledging that it is indeed a  "Big F*&ing Deal".  It's a bit late though!

California has been in drought more often than not since the early 1980s.  Here is a chart from Jeff Master's blog at wunderground.com.

Source: NOAA via wunderground.com

What to do?

Governor Brown is urging people to reduce water consumption by (another?) 20%.  (I believe residential water consumption per capita has dropped a lot in California, following successive public awareness campaigns and imposition of water restrictions.  I wasn't able to find any specific data - if someone knows of any maybe they can point to it).

In researching for this article I came across an interesting paper by Ryan Cahill and Jay Lund, which was published last year, with the title: Residential Water Conservation in Australia and California.  Below is a table from that paper using data for 2010 - I've highlighted Australia, Portland Oregon and Californian cities for comparison:

The very low residential consumption in Melbourne and Brisbane in particular reflects the severe droughts experienced there at the time, with water storages extremely low, strong water restrictions plus wide public awareness.  Remember the table is for 2010.  It is likely/possible that per capita consumption in the USA has dropped since then, but I don't know the numbers.

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Cahill, Ryan, and Jay Lund. "Residential water conservation in Australia and California." Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management 139, no. 1 (2012): 117-121.

Schwalm, Christopher R., Christopher A. Williams, Kevin Schaefer, Dennis Baldocchi, T. Andrew Black, Allen H. Goldstein, Beverly E. Law, Walter C. Oechel, and Russel L. Scott. "Reduction in carbon uptake during turn of the century drought in western North America." Nature Geoscience 5, no. 8 (2012): 551-556.

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From the WUWT comments

Here are a few comments to Anthony's article (archived here).


Bill Jamison says, wrongly, that "models have been predicting an El Nino for a while now".  They haven''t - at least the POAMA models at BoM haven't been.  They've been reporting ENSO neutral for quite some time:

January 18, 2014 at 2:51 pm
“If the Nino 3.4 model ensemble is to be believed, then California will likely see a strong precipitation rebound in 2014/2015.”
Those models have been predicting an El Nino for a while now. They have no skill unfortunately. We need a pattern change and the high pressure ridge to break down but I don’t see that happening any time soon. There just isn’t enough amplitude right now to break it down.

While  wazsah points out:

January 18, 2014 at 3:12 pm
This month the SOI index has moved positive – towards La Nina – both 30day and 90 day averages are trending more positive.

http://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/seasonalclimateoutlook/southernoscillationindex/30daysoivalues/

So just now any talk of El Nino is a touch creative.

(From BoM: Sustained positive values of the SOI above +8 may indicate a La Niña event, while sustained negative values below −8 may indicate an El Niño event. Values of between about +8 and −8 generally indicate neutral conditions. There was a recent HotWhopper article on ENSO.)


Gary Pearse says the opposite of what deniers in Australia typically advocate and says (excerpt):

January 18, 2014 at 2:51 pm
Desalination would seem to be good investment if drought is periodic. Personal ones from $1000 to $5000 producing 1 quart to 7 gallons an hour (yachtsmen know these things).

Pamela Gray says:

January 18, 2014 at 9:10 pm
ENSO neutral is a mistaken label in my opinion. I have said it before (and may have coined the label) that La Nada/El Nado may be where all the action is and should be studied as much if not more than El Niño/La Nina is.

And finally, a bit of global warming humour from down under, where we're having another hot and fiery summer.   Green Sand says:

January 18, 2014 at 3:57 pm
Overheard on OZ TV:-
Hot? Jeez, chickens are laying omelets!

"Big F*&ing Deal" says Anthony Watts to the record dry in California

Weather Whiplash - California driest on record, other states wettest on record

I found this on twitter - the source of information, protests at information and disinformation.

California is having its driest year in 119, so far. WI, MI, IO, IL having wettest. http://t.co/cDd2myADpW. Weather whiplash. #Climate
— Peter Gleick (@PeterGleick) July 15, 2013

Big F*&ing Deal says Anthony Watts

Anthony doesn't care about a record drought in California and tweets Big F*&ing Deal -"it's happened before - one thousand, one hundred years ago"!

BFD, about 1,100 years ago, what is now California baked in two droughts, the first lasting 220 years and the second 140 years.

Right! Similar could be said if a pandemic wiped out 1.4 billion people or 20% of the world's population - it's happened before, BFD!

A few people pointed out that record dry and record wet is a BFD this time around.  Apart from the fact that it's affecting millions of people who are alive now, in AnthonyWatts' own home state, here are some reasons why a record dry is a BFD for California:

• California population: 38 million
• California GDP: approx. $1.95 trillion
• Number of farms in California: approx 82,000 employing approx 36% of farm workers in the USA.

Not to mention all the water required to generate the power to all those farms, homes, factories and services supporting those 38 million residents, as well as the millions of people who rely on food and other goods exported from California.

Dr Gleick says California has water in storage, but drought is still a concern.

Finally Anthony backs off, tweeting that yes, it is a big deal but he angrily protests at the term "weather whiplash" to describe record wet on one side and record dry on the other side of the continent.

Oh it is, but your pointing it out as if it is "weather whiplash" is total unmitigated bullshit Peter. But, it is what you do.

Anthony gets angry when any climate scientist writes about weather or climate.  Especially adverse weather - because it makes people think about global warming.  Anthony is in the business of promulgating disinformation about global warming and he doesn't want any facts to get in his way, let alone actual weather events.

The Weather Whiplash

Peter Gleick linked to a map of the USA showing California with its driest January to June on record and several states having the wettest:

Source: NCDC/NOAA