WUWT sez let Africans starve, and implies Trump has single-handedly stopped climate change

I don't know if it's the Trump effect or if something else is causing denier blogs to be weirder and nastier than their normal weird and nasty. As you may have figured out, science deniers seem to think that global warming will stop now that Donald Trump has been elected (archived here). There's no rationale for this.

For years many science deniers have been arguing that "man" is too puny to have any discernible effect on the vast forces dominating Earth's climate. All of a sudden they've changed their tune, and many of them think that just one puny little man can change the direction of climate change and has stopped global warming dead in its tracks.

Weird, huh?

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.

Extreme December weather

December was not without extreme weather in many parts of the world. This past week has seen floods in South and North America, the UK and Ireland, worsening drought in southern Africa, wildfire in Australia and southern California, and unseasonally warm weather across the USA and Canada.

Worst floods in 50 years in South America

The BBC headline is "Flooding 'worst in 50 years', as 150,000 flee in Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay".  Rivers have broken banks after days of heavy rains.

Source: BBC

The worst affected is Paraguay, where more than 90,000 people were forced to leave their homes, many of them poor people living on the banks of the River Paraguay. This underscores the fact that it is the least wealthy who are most vulnerable to weather-related disasters.

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:

Out in time. Anthony Watts thinks it's 2050!

I don't know what's got into Anthony Watts. Yesterday he thought it was June instead of July, and wrote about an upcoming release of May data from NOAA, when that report had already been released a month ago.

Today Anthony seems to think that 2050 is behind us (archived here). That it's been and gone. That we're already past the middle of this century. He wrote about a "failed prediction" from Joe Romm of Climate Progress, quoting him as writing (my emphasis):

In 2007, Science (subs. req’d) published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” — levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas to California.  Last year, a comprehensive literature review, “Drought under global warming: a review,” by NCAR found that we risk multiple, devastating global droughts worse than the Dust Bowl even on moderate emissions path.  Another study found the U.S. southwest could see a 60-year drought this century.

Anthony Watts has discovered pristine US temperature (and MS Excel)

Today, after having no opinion on whether or not greenhouse gases work, Anthony Watts has decided to get an opinion. In his opinion the US temperature record maintained by NOAA is pristine. That is, the NOAA Climate Reference Network is pristine. Just how long he'll think it will remain pristine is the question. He wrote an article (archived here) with the headline: "Despite attempts to erase it globally, “the pause” still exists in pristine US surface temperature data"

This time Anthony had nothing but praise for the scientists who work at NOAA. (He did sneak in some snide comments verging on the defamatory by implication. He's got to keep his disreputable reputation intact.) His praise was only because he liked what he saw or he would have hidden it from his readers. He saw a temperature chart from 2005 to 2014 and figured that was good enough for his purposes. Anthony wrote:

But, what if there were a dataset of temperature that was so well done, so scientifically accurate, and so completely free of bias that by its design, there would never be any need nor justification for any adjustments to the data?
Such a temperature record exists, it is called the U.S. Climate Reference Network, (USCRN) and it is also operated by NOAA/NCDC’s (NCEI) head administrator,Tom Karl:

Given that Anthony has been busy for years trying to prove that the record isn't pristine, this is a bit of an about face. Is he admitting defeat? You might think so, mightn't you. Let's come back in five years time, and see if Anthony still says the data is pristine.

Data source: NOAA

Here is a comparison of the pristine with the non-pristine, on an annual basis. I'll let you spot the difference:

Data source: NOAA

OMG. Anthony Watts is right. The USA temperature has paused! Ooh, it's worse than that - it's cooling!

Let's just see how much the USA has cooled over the past 120 years. If you read WUWT you'll probably think the USA is practically in an ice age.

Around the climate blogs: addiction to global mean temperature; and the electricity cost of California's drought

HotWhopper exists to replace deniers' disinformation with science, which means that it's easy to forget there is real work going on out in the world. A couple of items from the Blog Roll are worth reading when you want a break from the conspiracy-theorising nuttery that goes on in the deniosphere.

Addiction to global mean temperature: Isaac Held

First of all, Isaac Held has written about the addiction to global mean temperature and the dangers in considering it in isolation. Isaac Held is a modeler with the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Research Laboratory at Princeton University, although the views expressed are his own, not any official position. He talks about what can happen if you use simple globally averaged box models, without taking account of spatial structure of the response to forcing. His articles are for the advanced climate hawk, usually. But I dare say that most HotWhopper readers wouldn't find this latest article of his difficult.

The energy cost of the Californian drought: Peter Gleick

Moving away from the theoretical to the practical, Peter Gleick has written about the impact of the Californian drought on the cost of its electricity supply. Peter Gleick is President of the Pacific Institute in Oakland. He reports that California has had to replace cheap hydro electricity with more expensive power from natural gas. (Can you take out drought insurance against higher electricity prices?) Drought has been a big problem for electricity supply in Brazil, too.

WUWT strawman: Week 13 of 52 - not much extreme weather? So sez Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts, or one of his surrogates, has made a brief appearance at WUWT to write a headline and an opening salvo. Here is what he wrote (archived here):

So far, 2015 seems to be a bad year for the ‘severe weather caused by climate change” meme

Anthony Watts / 21 mins ago March 22, 2015

Looks like another “divergence problem” as tornadoes don’t follow the climatology

That's it. The rest was a copy and paste of an article from NOAA (archived here). The NOAA article was about how there have been no tornadoes reported in the USA this March, so far. This is a record - since 1970 at any rate.

Anthony Watts talked about a "meme", but what he wrote is a logical fallacy known as a strawman, as you'll see below.

It's not my fault, sez E. Calvin Beisner, on Syrian drought and conflict

Is Anthony Watts trying to send a message? Was I was off track when I wrote yesterday that "I'm not suggesting that Anthony Watts is part of the Cornwall Alliance or CFACT. "? He's followed up his article from CFACT with an article from the pseudo-religious political group the Cornwall Alliance.

Drought implicated in the Syrian conflict

There is a new paper in PNAS, which is getting a bit of publicity. Anthony Watts has already had a protest article by Pat'n Chip of the CATO Institute, and now has another.

The paper, was by Colin P. Kelley of the University of California, Santa Barbara and co-authors from Columbia University NY. It reports research that suggests that the 2007-2010 drought in the greater Fertile Crescent, which was the most severe in the instrumental record, was made 2 to 3 times more likely with CO2 warming than by natural variability alone. The authors conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict.

The supplementary information shows a timeline of events. As always, click to enlarge it:

Fig. S1. Timeline of events leading up to the civil uprising that began in March 2011, along with a graph depicting the net urban influx (in millions) of Syrian IDPs and Iraqi refugees since 2005. Source: Kelley15 SI.

Last year an article on the Red Cross website stated in part:

Between 2006 and 2013, 60% of the Syrian territory experienced the worst long-term drought and the bigger reduction of agricultural crops since thousands of years. The drought in Syria this year is expected to cause an 18% reduction in wheat and 65% decrease in barley production. 

The PNAS paper isn't the first to report on the impact of the drought in Syria. Last year there was a paper by Peter Gleick in the AMS journal "Weather, Climate and Society", which discussed how water shortage was one of the factors contributing to conflict in the region.

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.

---

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.

---

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!

Is Judith Curry arguing for political constraints on climate science?

Anthony Watts blog at WUWT is tending to the really boring nutty right now so I popped over to see what was happening at Judith Curry's blog.  She's decided to go all out in favour of politicians putting limitations on scientific research.  Apparently , Nebraskan lawmakers are wanting scientists to prepare a report on "cyclical climate change" but telling them they are not allowed to consider any human influences on climate.  Judith finds it "strange" that any scientist would object to such limitations. (Archived here.)

Here is the advert for the study:

The advertisement looks innocuous, but apparently some lawmakers in Nebraska won't permit the scientists to take into account any human factors.  In other words they are putting political limitations on science.

Here is a report about the farce in a local news service:

The request says researchers “should consider 'cyclical climate change' to mean a change in the state of climate due to natural internal processes and only natural external forcings such as volcanic eruptions and solar variations.”

The use of the term “natural” would rule out the primary cause of the climate changes that have occurred in the last half-century: humans.

The issue of “cyclical” climate change was successfully amended into Haar's bill by Sen. Beau McCoy of Omaha, a Republican candidate for governor.

McCoy on Tuesday elaborated on his opposition to using state tax dollars to study man-made climate change: Humans aren't capable of influencing climate patterns.

CFACT bought into the issue, writing (archived here)

A few weeks ago, Nebraska lawmakers called for a wide-ranging study of “cyclical” climate change. Funded by the state, the $44,000 effort was to be limited to natural causes – not additional speculation about manmade effects. Amazingly, University of Nebraska scientists are not just refusing to participate in the study, unless it includes human influences. One climatologist at the university’s National Drought Mitigation Center actually said he would not be comfortable circulating a study proposal or asking other scientists to participate in it; in fact, he “would not send it out” to anyone. The director of the High Plains Climate Center sniffed, “If it’s only natural causes, we would not be interested.”

Their dismissive stance seems mystifying – until one examines climate change politics and financing.

CFACT went further, writing this nonsense:

None of these Nebraska scientists seems reluctant to accept far larger sums for “research” that focuses solely on human causes; nor do professors at Penn bearprotestsState, Virginia, George Mason, or other academic or research institutions. They’re likewise not shy about connecting “dangerous manmade global warming” to dwindling frog populations, shrinking Italian pasta supplies, clownfish getting lost, cockroaches migrating, and scores of other remote to ridiculous assertions – if the claims bring in research grants.

As if scientists determine the results of their research before they do it. CFACT isn't interested in facts.  They prefer to make stuff up as long as it's congruent with their aim of trashing the natural environment as fast as their little legs can carry them.

The Texas State Climatologist and Professor of Meteorology at Texas A&M University, John Nielsen-Gammon has written about it in the Houston Chronicle. What John is saying is that one of the scientists who refused to bid for the funds studies drought.  He is an expert in drought. Just drought.  Not drought from only natural causes or drought from only human causes, just drought. Period.  He wrote:

Knowing who these Nebraska scientists actually are, this [CFACT] article is simply sickening.  It goes on like this for a while, bringing up Galileo, Einstein, Stalin, and Lysenko, and concludes:

“Nebraskan (and other) researchers must end their hide-bound focus on human causes – and start working to understand all the complex, interrelated factors behind global climate changes and cycles. Government financiers and policy makers must do likewise. Our future well-being depends on it.”

Hey, CFACT, I have news for you: we climate scientists, at Nebraska and elsewhere, are already doing this.  We refuse to be told by politicians to restrict the scope of our scientific investigations.  Some of us feel so strongly about this that we are willing to pass up grant money that comes with politically-motivated restrictions.  And we’re willing to do this even at the possible cost of having our reputations dragged through the mud by the likes of you.

Because, despite our best efforts, some of us get used as political pawns anyway.

By the way, in a footnote, CFACT notes that the same authors will “discuss harassment of CAGW skeptics in a future article”.  Hypocrites.

 Judith says John's explanation doesn't "make sense" to her.  Apparently in Judith's world it is okay to put political constraints on the factors that academics can take into account when doing scientific research.  She lives in a strange little world.

What Judith is arguing for is that climate scientists should accept a requirement that they refuse to consider any factors that are associated with all the added greenhouse gases in the air.

Yep.  Judith Curry is advocating politically constrainted "science" if there is any such thing. How could scientists possibly study something if they are not allowed to consider all possible factors?  How could scientists study any weather change without acknowledging that the extra greenhouse gases are affecting climate and weather? Whatever results they came up with would have to be wrong from the start.  They wouldn't be able to use any climate models that included the current level of greenhouse gases, nor allowed for the growth of greenhouse gases.

Judith has put her hand up for the money.  Not only that, she's offered to do a study where she has already decided the results, writing (my bold italics):

JC message to Nebraska lawmakers:  I understand why you want to better understand and predict the natural variability of drought in Nebraska, such as seen in Figure 1 above.  I have been studying climate variability in the high plains, specifically temperature and winds, for a DOE funded study on predicting wind power variability.  For $44K, I would be happy to extend our study to include precipitation and drought, interpreting Nebraska climate variability in context of the stadium wave and including probabilistic projections of extremes for the next two decades. And I am sure that there are other researchers outside the state of Nebraska who would be willing to address this topic also.

Is Judith claiming that Nebraska droughts are caused by her stadium wave?  AFAIK she hasn't even said what causes her so-called stadium wave.   All she's done is say "here's a pattern we think we've found".

It gets worse, with a logic fail from Judith.  In the comments she writes:

curryja | November 29, 2013 at 11:38 am | Reply
Can you look at Figure 1 and deny that there is natural variability? 

I've added the following comment (Sou 5:14 pm 1 Dec 13):

curryja | November 29, 2013 at 3:30 pm | Reply
Hi Don I agree. I am tweeting with Gavin about this, the main objection seems to be their refusal to consider AGW. Well AGW seems to be getting a lot of consideration, whereas natural internal variability seems to be the main driver on the time scales of interest, and is getting insufficient consideration. So political posturing on both sides; you expect this from politicians but not from scientists.

Since when did it become "political posturing" to be able to do science free from political constraints? (It's science deniers who keep bringing up Lysenko conspiracy theories trying to claim that AGW is a Lysenko plot!  Judith is arguing that a research project that takes into account all possible factors, regardless of whether they are natural or anthropogenic is "political posturing".) (Edited re later comment from Judith. Sou 5:14 pm 1 Dec 13)

The point is not whether there is "natural variability".  The point is that no politician should be putting these sort of constraints on scientific research.  It would be like handing out grant money to study the common cold and telling researchers that they are not to consider any viral causation.  Natural variability is taking place in a world heated up by global warming.  There is no pure natural variability any more.  All weather is influenced by the added greenhouse gases.

You can't just remove greenhouse warming from the equation and say - oh look, this is what the weather would be like without greenhouse gases.  That would be of no value to Nebraskans.  The farmers there want to know what to expect in the future.  What is realistic.  Not what would have been expected if we hadn't been adding greenhouse gases to the air.

A responsible scientist would not be able to do the research in good faith.  But Judith Curry would.

If Judith doesn't win the tender, maybe Anthony Watts will find a use for their money.  He could do a review of weather stations in Nebraska and conclude that even if they get more droughts it will be okay, it won't get too hot.  Any extra heat associated with drought can be put down to "Nebraskan UHI disease".

Callous amusement and display of meteorological ignorance from Anthony Watts

Here is yet another display of ignorance from ex-weather announcer Anthony Watts.

It's also one thing to be a disinformation propagandist but it seems to me to be particularly poor taste to be so insensitive to other people's suffering.

Is it an attempt to distract from the extreme weather in the USA?  It's been the driest year to date on record in California and then there is the horrible fire in Colorado this week and its record-breaking hot weather.

No, Anthony, there is no La Niña

Here is a snapshot of an article from today. (Click any image to enlarge).

For someone who used to earn a crust by announcing weather on television, not to mention blogging about "weather and climate" for the past six and a half years, you'd think some knowledge of weather would have rubbed off.  But no, Anthony says there is currently a La Niña and that it's been in place for two years.

No Anthony, it's been well over a year since the end of the last La Niña   The most recent La Niña started to form in October 2011 and persisted until March 2012.  It was pretty well back to back with another La Niña that started to firm up back in July 2010 and finished in May 2011. Conditions have been ENSO neutral since the 27 March 2012 at the latest.  Here is the official notification of it ending, from the Bureau of Meteorology:

Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

In its latest ENSO wrap-up, the Bureau states:

All atmospheric and oceanic indicators of ENSO have remained neutral (neither El Niño nor La Niña) since mid-2012. While most models suggest that neutral conditions will continue in 2013, it remains possible that a La Niña event could develop later in the year.

The ENSO state is mostly indicated by the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI).  From the Bureau again (on the SOI tab):

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.

And more here:

The Southern Oscillation Index, or SOI, gives an indication of the development and intensity of El Niño or La Niña events in the Pacific Ocean. The SOI is calculated using the pressure differences between Tahiti and Darwin. ...Sustained positive values are indicative of La Niña conditions, and sustained negative values indicative of El Niño conditions.

Here is a chart of the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) from the Bureau, going back to 2008:

Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

The closest it came to a La Niña was back in March this year when the SOI briefly rose about +8, but there was no suggestion that one was about to develop.

Why the persistent drought in the USA when it's ENSO neutral?

Source: National Drought Forum Report

Why then is the drought persisting across 44.1% of the contiguous USA?  Well the tweet that Anthony mocked had a link to the NDIS website, which then led to a report released last month on 16 May 2013.  That report  talked a lot about the current drought and how to respond.  But it didn't discuss what is causing the drought.  About the closest it came was this sentence on page 7 of the report:

The Administration is considering the relevance of climate change as it relates to drought, and the corresponding need for adaptation strategies and strategies for protecting fresh water resources.

Obviously anthropogenic global warming.is affecting all weather around the world today.  Researchers have attempted to determine the extent to which it contributed to the drought in Texas.  Peterson et al (2012) is one such study.  In that report there is a section on the drought in Texas, which concludes with:

Hence, while we can provide evidence that the risk of hot and dry conditions has increased, we cannot say that the 2011 Texas drought and heat wave was "extremely unlikely" (in any absolute sense) to have occurred before this recent warming.

The questions of importance include:

• Will extremes of weather get more extreme?  The answer is obviously yes when it comes to heat and precipitation events.
• How will the different climate zones change over time?  Will parts of the USA become more prone to drought or flood?  Probably, is what I gather.

No, Anthony - it's not "variance"

As for Anthony Watts, you'd have thought in his years as a weather announcer he'd have picked up some knowledge of weather and ENSO.  Instead of admitting he was wrong, he writes this:

skSK says:
June 14, 2013 at 11:34 am Your ENSOMETER signals neutral

REPLY: Yes, that’s called “variance”. It changes from week to week. Check the Enso page: http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/climatic-phenomena-pages/enso/ -Anthony

No, Anthony.  Wrong again.  ENSO is a sustained period, it doesn't "change from week to week" at all.

Finally...but too little too late

Finally, just as I was about to publish this article, I see that Anthony grudgingly admits his mistake, writing:

Anthony Watts says:
June 14, 2013 at 4:17 pm  I’ve changed the headline to more accurately reflect the history.

So here is the new headline, but still with the comment about the "La Niña pattern" and this time trying to pin the extended drought on the absence of El Niño.  Not good enough, Anthony!

Is WUWT on its last legs?

With the spate of idiotic articles lately and his reliance on nincompoops like Monckton (even promoting his nonsense to "sticky" status), and now manufacturing a La Niña as a "reason" for the continued US drought - it looks as if WUWT is on its last legs.  A refuge for the 8% Dismissives.  That's all.

A Whopper of a Heatwave II: HotCopper Deniers

Australia's heat wave is getting some attention.  Not just here in Australia, we can't ignore it, but from elsewhere as well.  It's a real doozy.  You can read about it on MotherJones, and in the UK Guardian, The Telegraph and in many places on the blogosphere, like here and here.

One of the big problems is that we've had a lot of rain this past year or two - aka the 'big wet', when large areas of the continent were covered in water - to the north, south, east, west and in the centre of Australia.  2010-11 was the wettest summer on record in Victoria and in Darwin and no-one can forget the tragic loss of life in the Lockyer Valley when Queensland flooded in the same season.  Once the water evaporated, sank into the ground or flowed to the sea the plants started growing again.  (If you remember, the 'big wet' followed the 'great drought', which didn't end till 2010.)  That means lots of fuel for fire.

In 2009 more than 179 people died in a fire that started in catastrophic conditions on a day known locally as Black Saturday.  Most of us knew some of them or knew people who knew some of them.  It was a bad day that affected the whole nation.

Now it's 2013 and in this 'big heat', fires have taken hold, burning out almost entire small towns and hamlets in Tasmania and continuing to rage in our island state as well as in many parts of the mainland.  NSW had the worst fire danger conditions on record - and fires took hold and are still burning out of control.

Reaction from deniers

This blog pokes fun at the silliness that pervades a share trading site, HotCopper, from top management down.  (It's a microcosm of the world that science deniers and conspiracy theorists inhabit, seeing the conservative old white male as its target market.)  But there's nothing silly about the weather extremes in Australia over the past few years.  There have been too many tragedies.  Yet there are still a few people who simply cannot accept that our climate is changing.  While the continent has been sweltering in a record heat event, they write things like this, in response to a post about this article from The Age about the record heat (bear in mind that these are posts on a Science and Medicine forum):

You can grow things in 'Hot-Houses'... But you can NOT grow things in a Deep-Freezer. Birdman29

What a waste of bandwidth this thread is, started I notice by an alarmist, one of the group who tell us that science rules. Hanrahan, the resident troll, dismisses the freak conditions and its consequences as not worth writing about, as well as flaming the poster and denying science in the same keyboard attack.

Ever thought of simply making your point without denigrating those who don't accept your gloomy outlook? And more: Grow up, stop sulking, learn how to debate civilly. Troll Hanrahan again, king of denigration who often has sulking fits and will never learn how to 'debate'.

Do you think that it being summer could have anything to do with it? BenBradley, resident paranoid conspiracy theorist, disagrees with the Bureau of Meteorology.  He thinks this freak heat wave is normal summer weather.

The Earth's climate varies. We need to adjust. astrayalien, recent winner of the HotWhopper dumbest post award, who thinks our atmosphere cools the planet rather than keeping it warm, but nevertheless thinks we will need to adjust.  Yes we do!

People who go on about global warming because its hot outside during summer just show thier (sic) extreme ignorance re climate change. Idiots. From 'CO2 is plant food' muzzarati, who thanks god for poor, much maligned CO2.

That sums up the majority of HotCopper S&M-ers.  Not merely ignorant but wilfully ignorant and proud of it!