Claim: Cause of California drought linked to climate change – not one mention of ENSO or El Niño

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Anthony Watts:

More despicable climate hype from Noah Diffenbaugh (press release follows) who is ignoring the obvious: California has had far worse droughts before “global warming” was a glimmer in a scientist’s eye, and these were driven by changes in weather patterns that happened long before CO2 became an issue. For example the worst drought of the past century doesn’t even make the top ten. And as this graph shows, our current California drought is but a blip in the larger historical scheme of things:

California_drought_timelineUPDATE: WUWT reader Jimbo adds in comments that the models are about a 50/50 split over wetter/drier:

To more directly address the question of whether climate change played a role in the probability of the 2013 event, the team collaborated with scientist Bala Rajaratnam, also of Stanford.

Rajaratnam applied advanced statistical techniques to a large suite of climate model simulations.

It’s called the weather and GIGO. Climate computer simulations are a pile of crap.

Abstract
The Key Role of Heavy Precipitation Events in Climate Model Disagreements of Future Annual Precipitation Changes in California
Climate model simulations disagree on whether future precipitation will increase or decrease over California, which has impeded efforts to anticipate and adapt to human-induced climate change……..Between these conflicting tendencies, 12 projections show drier annual conditions by the 2060s and 13 show wetter. These results are obtained from 16 global general circulation models downscaled with different combinations of dynamical methods…
http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00766.1


From NSF: Press Release 14-129

Extreme atmospheric conditions responsible for drought more likely to occur in current global warming

California_Drought_Dry_Riverbed_NOAA_f[1]

The drought crippling California is by some measures the worst in the state’s history.
Credit and Larger Version

September 29, 2014

The atmospheric conditions associated with the unprecedented drought in California are very likely linked to human-caused climate change, researchers report.

Climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford University and colleagues used a novel combination of computer simulations and statistical techniques to show that a persistent region of high atmospheric pressure over the Pacific Ocean–one that diverted storms away from California–was much more likely to form in the presence of modern greenhouse gas concentrations.

The result, published today in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, is one of the most comprehensive studies to investigate the link between climate change and California’s ongoing drought.

“Our research finds that extreme atmospheric high pressure in this region–which is strongly linked to unusually low precipitation in California–is much more likely to occur today than prior to the emission of greenhouse gases that began during the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s,” says Diffenbaugh.

The exceptional drought crippling California is by some measures the worst in state history.

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Common core question. George Clooney’s wedding had a carbon footprint of:
a. negative zero
b. 1 bizillion tons
c. This question would only be asked by a denier. George really cares about the environment.

In parts of CA people are being limited (by a prohibitively expensive tier-payment system) to only 82 gallons of water per person per day.
We used to live in a 27-unit condo complex that shared its water bill.
As more owner-occupiers sold to investors and thus more renters moved in, the water bill skyrocketed.
Why would renters need more water than owners-occupiers?
They don’t.
They just have no dog in the hunt.
They don’t tie in their water usage with their rent.
So, they use it like its free.
When we sold there were only two owner-occupiers left.
(There had only been one renter when we bought 25 years before.)
So, multiply this wasteful attitude by tens of millions of renters in CA and there’s your problem, right there.