Climate change did not cause 2012 US drought, says government report

[ZRT2209]

Source: Guardian

The historic drought that blazed across America's corn belt last year was not caused by climate change, a federal government study found.

...

Barack Obama and other prominent figures have repeatedly cited the drought as evidence of climate change. But the report released on Thursday by scientists at five different government agencies said that was not the case. The drought was "a sequence of unfortunate events" that occurred suddenly, the report said. The circumstances were so unusual the drought could never have been predicted.

...


However, Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, who was also contacted by the Associated Press, said the study failed to take into account the lack of snowpack in the Rockies or how climate change may have played a role in keeping the jet stream away.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/12/climate-change-not-2012-drought

[villager]

1. "'... therefore,' the report concluded, 'we are free to stay on our knees to our corporate

...owners, with this new 'plausible deniability' allowing us to avoid having to take any action that might displease our masters."

[backscatter712]

2. Mohammed on a Polaroid, the teabaggers are gonna be howling about this.

Of course, they're not going to pay attention to the fact that other climate scientists have criticized the study for, among other things, failing to include important variables in its modeling.

But teabaggers don't know how to read scientific research or use critical thinking to evaluate studies. They just find the one study in five hundred that fits their views and declare it to be their gospel.

[delrem]

3. Well, I hope these agencies are prepared to explain away next years' "unfortunate events".

[ZRT2209]

10. Lemony Snickets!

[ZRT2209]

4. wonder what they'll say when this "freakish one-off event" keeps happening

[truthisfreedom]

6. After another.

[kentauros]

16. They'll give it a name,

and then just call it "weather", as in "weather just happens, like the tides."

[lunatica]

29. It'll all go in the file called

[elleng]

5. Hunh?

'failed to take into account the lack of snowpack in the Rockies or how climate change may have played a role in keeping the jet stream away.'

[ZRT2209]

8. pesky details!

[raouldukelives]

11. Just like in any other government report, it only reports what they want it to.

Get rid of the variables that don't ensure success, eliminate pesky data and voila!
Until we can look at problems honestly, nothing will ever be solved honestly.

[tout_le_monde]

7. BS from Fossil Fuel Shills/Stooges

The fires will keep happening, and the climate change-denying assholes will continue to maintain that its STILL not a climate change consequence. Computer simulation is ONLY useful when it can correctly predict. An incomplete/incorrect math model coded into a computer simulation will NEVER yield meaningful results. It is as Dr. Marvin Minsky (father of AI) once said(paraphrased):

When you're on the wrong bus, you'll never get to your desired destination.

[ZRT2209]

9. or: garbage in, garbage out

[grahamhgreen]

12. But it CONTRIBUTED to it.

[mpcamb]

20. Maybe sucking the cornbelt aquifers

drier and drier did too.

[ronnie624]

31. "Maybe sucking the cornbelt aquifers drier and drier" did what?

Caused the drought?

Can you elaborate?

[mpcamb]

36. "Can you elaborate?"

I'm not sure I can in any scientific or specific way.
That said, after 67 years on this planet and having traversed this country more than a half dozen times, I know it's not the same landmass I was looking at half a century ago.
The population has more than doubled from the 153 million I remember in my 5th grade geography book. That density has played out in a lot of ways and there's currently no population control movement, so I'm concerned about water supply, hence the aquifer reference. I think there's a real danger in endlessly pulling water out of the Ogalala aquifer to spit it in circles to grow subsidized crops.
A glass of water was free when you sat at a counter years ago and didn't come in a plastic container that costs a buck. The loss of local control over water supplies, as has happened in small towns like my own, concerns me especially.
I'm not talking about these changes with nostalgia for "the good ole days", but as a contrast to things we take for granted as part of our day to day existence. Is this unsustainable? Can all this lead to another dustbowl phase? Sure seems like it to me. You can get scientists to line up on various side of this argument and shout at each other, but because one argues better than the other I don't think the issue is settled. I know the climate and the land are different and that the change has been a rapid one. I don't see a lot of benefit in pretending it's neutral or benign.

I just re-read your post/question. "...did what?" - "Contributed to the drought", is my short answer, and that's more a feeling than anything I can defend with statistics and charts.
The other part is a longer one, is more directed to the "Can you elaborate?" part.

[mbperrin]

13. So the 2011 drought WAS climate change, according to the report,

but 2012 not?

Nutty.

No, not really, just bought and paid for.

Meanwhile, here I sit in west Texas with less than 1" of rain so far this year. Wonder if 2013 will be another one-off or will it be climate change? Gosh, I'm on pins and needles.

And dry dirt and water rationing.

[kristopher]

14. This article is slanting the report's findings

The report looked at the Central Plains Drought and asked whether it was an expansion of the Texas drought and if its origins were of a nature that would cause us to expect drought in that region as a chronic condition (a new and changed climate).

here is their summary: http://www.drought.gov/media/pgfiles/callouts.pdf

Posted in full:

Text in Callout Boxes from
An Interpretation of the Origins of the 2012 Central Great Plains Drought Assessment Report
• This report describes the morphology of the 2012 summer U.S. central Great Plains drought, placing the event into a historical context, and providing a diagnosis of its proximate and underlying causes.
• Absent were the usual abundance of slow soaking rain systems and evening thunderstorms that characterize Great Plains climate from May through August, and as a result surface moisture conditions greatly deteriorated.
• It is expected that water supply reductions in the semi-arid western portions of the drought where reservoir storage was depleted by lack of rains will also have long-term impacts, as will livestock health and its long term effect on herd stocks.
• The 2012 crop yield deficit and the implied climatic impact was a historic event. In terms of absolute loss in bushels of corn production, no single year since 1866 experienced so large a curtailment as occurred during 2012.
• Summertime Great Plains rainfall has been in an upward trend since the early 20th Century, and the last major drought occurred 25 years ago in 1988. The 2012 drought thus was a —climate surprise—, and would not have been anticipated from simple considerations of central U.S. rainfall behavior in the recent past.
• The Central Plains drought of 2012 was not a progression or northward creeping of the prior year’s Southern Plains drought event. There were no strong indicators that an extreme drought event was poised to spread over the Central Plains in 2012.
• As is common with droughts, atmospheric moisture in both absolute and relative measures is typically deficient, and 2012 was no exception. A second, and often inexorably linked factor is the absence of processes that produce rainfall over the central Plains.
• Underlying causes refer to root causes, within a chain of factors, that lead to an outcome. Climate scientists are especially interested in identifying such causes because they can entail useful long-lead predictability. The report examines sea surface temperature (SST) and sea ice conditions, and also the chemical composition of the atmosphere, as potential underlying causes for the drought over the central Plains in summer 2012.
• Climate simulations and empirical analysis suggest that neither ocean surface temperatures nor changes in greenhouse gases induced a substantial reduction in summertime precipitation over the central Great Plains during 2012. Diagnosis of historical data, climate simulation data, and seasonal forecasts paint a picture of an extreme drought that may not have had extreme forcing as its cause and that had limited long lead predictability.
• It is a speculative yet an intriguing conjecture that, while perhaps unbeknownst and undetectable from the observations, the recent 10-15 year period may have been one of heightened risk for the occurrence of a record setting summer drought over the central Great Plains.
• Experimental methods are being studied that offer some hope for improved prediction, at least for short lead times, of drought conditions such as occurred in 2012.
• The interpretation of the 2012 drought as rendered in this report of the NOAA Drought Task Force raises, and in part helps to answer, several science challenges including questions on improving applicability and utility of drought infomation.
• The use of both climate and forecast models in interpreting the 2012 central Plains drought is a promising approach for explaining event causes with a goal to improve forecasts and forecasting practices.
• There is need for further research to better understand how oceans and land surface conditions are related to regional climate that can induce drought. Sustained monitoring, integrated with advanced modeling methods, offer hope for improved drought outlooks in the future.

[lunatica]

15. So do they conclude that it was an act of God?

[freshwest]

26. Governor Goodhair proclaimed that. But Americans didn't pray enough. Not God's fault, humanity's.

[olddad56]

17. "says government report". well, if you can't believe a corrupt government, who can you believe?

[blkmusclmachine]

18. I don't care what BHO says on pretty much anything now. Climate included.

[L0oniX]

19. LOL ...tax payer money spent on fixed facts ...whodathunkit. n/t

[ananda]

21. My reading.

There are two agendas at play here.

One is cya on the part of the so-called fed scientists who didn't see the drought coming.

The other is an attempt to appear credible in showing how polar ice melt and subsequent shifting of currents and jet streams are supposedly unrelated to climate change.

These guys sound so compromised by big oil and pro-corporate politics.

[byeya]

22. They do sound compromised; that's a legtimate inference.

[Xithras]

23. Wow. What a bunch of pessimists.

Does it not occur to anyone that it might have just been a dry year? Climatologists have long known that occasional out-of-cycle droughts are a normal and unavoidable part of North American weather patterns.

Martin Hoerling is not a climate change denier, and has stated unequivocally in the past that human induced climate change is very real, and that mankind needs to reduce CO2 emissions to combat it. This guy isn't an oil company shill.

He is a scientist, and not a politician. He's not pushing a policy, but is simply saying that...in this one case...the reduction in rainfall wasn't caused by climate forcing.

FWIW, it's entirely true that not ALL climate change effects are caused by global warming or climate forcing. In the Sierra Nevada near my home, many uneducated activists incorrectly claim that the retreat of Sierra glaciers and the earlier melt-off dates in these mountains is attributable to climate change. They're wrong. There has been plenty of research indicating that the REAL reason for the reduction in Sierra snowpack is an increase in particulate pollution that causes it to melt faster, and that the glacial retreat is primarily attributable to the draining of the once-vast wetlands that used to cover the Central Valley upwind from the mountains (lowering downwind humidity and nearly eliminating midsummer snow showers across the peaks). That same draining has also been partially implicated in the increased dessication of the Great Basin that has occurred over the past century.

The fact that one event wasn't caused by Global Climate Change doesn't mean that Climate Change isn't real. It just means that the ONE EVENT wasn't caused by it. Nothing more, nothing less.

When "science" and "politics" disagree, it's usually because the "politics" is wrong.

[AverageJoe90]

25. Makes sense to me.

When "science" and "politics" disagree, it's usually because the "politics" is wrong.

Very true, although some on our side don't quite get the memo just yet, I'm afraid.....

[Psephos]

28. excellent post n/t

[Harmony Blue]

32. Yeah particlulate pollution is a problem

and definitely anthropogenic in origin which tends to accumulate in the troposphere.

[Xithras]

35. In the Sierra Nevada it's more localized than that.

In Northern and Central California, the Central Valley typically has spring weather while the mountains are buried in snow only 50 miles away. Today, for example, we're having typical beautiful mid-April weather in the mid-70's, but I can look east out of my yard and see the Sierras buried in snow only a short drive away (a bit less buried than usual this year, but it's still there).

The problem is that the Central Valley is home to millions of people and their cars, and home to some of the most intensely farmed land in the world. It's also a giant bowl that catches all of the dust, smog, and particulate pollution from those activities, often giving it some of the worst air quality in the nation. When the temps on the Valley floor rise, smog starts forming and the farms kick into high gear. Valley residents long for the breezy days that periodically "clean out" our air by blowing the pollution elsewhere.

Unfortunately, our prevailing winds mean that the "elsewhere" is usually over the Sierra's, which are still covered in snow during the spring. Much of this pollution settles on the snow as the air thins and loses its ability to carry it, which changes the albedo of the snow and causes it to melt faster.

Tropospheric particulates are certainly an issue, but earlier snow melt in the Sierra's can be traced to a more mundane homegrown source. The funny thing is, some people still insist on citing it as evidence of global climate change, and if you try to correct them they'll paint you as some sort of denier. It's silly...mankind does ALL SORTS of damage to the environment. While climate change effects everyone, some environmental problems genuinely have nothing to do with it.

[AverageJoe90]

24. This may very well be true.....

.....But if the deniers think that they can use an unfortunate circumstantial single event such as this, or the rather chilly winter in much of the country this year, they're totally wrong, as always.

[freshwest]

27. How about the heat produced by paving and deforestation? Oops, can't talk about that...

[Harmony Blue]

30. Actually it is talked about often

Ironically climage change deniers use this argument to argue that average temperature variance is a result of this. That may be true somewhat but climate change doesn't necessarily mean an increase in temperature which is why calling it globlal warming is misleading. Global climate change tends to lead to fluctuating temperature ranges. For terrestial environments the fluctuating changes are not as drastic at first, but still noticeable. But in the oceans of the world small changes to temperature changes drastically impacts eco systems and how the ocean is stratified in terms of salinity and temperature.

When it comes to talking about reducing Co2 emissions I strongly feel deforestation is often overlooked. Not only that, but there are increased incidences of mass gravity flow events or floods that could prevent such occurences. Many people in the world live in areas prone to such events and lives could be saved, and also increase the standard of living of the people. Yes, planting vegetation truly has so many positive effects on the eco system, and the humans that live near or on such an environment. This is why the idea of a carbon tax is folly from my point of view if deforestation continues unabated. Deforestation is often overshadowed in discussions when it comes to anthropogenic influences on climate change.

As for paving of urban sprawl and suburb type of communities that come with it..I think this trend will slow down for the United States. We probably will move back towards a European model once more as gasoline prices continue to increase, and water will become more scarce so having nice green lawns will soon be part of the past.

[freshwest]

34. These things are caused by humans; that's the major thrust of the deniers argument. They claim

'It's not our fault, it's God's plan, or the way the planets are aligned, or a cycle.'

Anything to keep from having to accept that human activities and its destruction of the environment is destroying the environment.

Because that would require giving some comfort or losing some profit. The climate issue, like water being industrially polluted, are not naturally occuring events, they are the sole result of humanity's disregard for our spaceship Earth and disdain for other people and living things.

What goes around comes around, but half of them expect to be raptured out of the mess, and/or to kill a significant part of the world's population to leave them more to play with. It is a moral issue, and they refuse to take blame.

[Pterodactyl]

33. Scientific study or not, I think the TRUTH is obvious to everyone!

We should only accept scientific studies that confirm our preexisting beliefs!