One of the problems in communicating climate science concerns peoples' perceptions versus climate reality. For example, most middle-to-slightly-older-agers who grew up in the Mid-Atlantic region will tell you that it just doesn't snow like it did in their youth (and usually they will blame global warming). Indeed, the 1960s were a very snowy decade. But somehow, we tend to view what we grew up with as "normal," while everything different in our adult lives is "abnormal." [Caution: this applies to more than weather and climate.]
Consider what happened in the American West in the early 20th century, when population grew roughly 50% from decade-to-decade, the largest regional growth spurt in post-colonial American history. People were lured by warm temperatures and abundant moisture. For much of that period, believe it or not, the West was a green paradise. Abundant moisture was so much du jour that allocation rights for Colorado River water, which have been contended ever since, were based upon what turns out to be the wettest period in nearly 1200 years. Had early 20th century planners had modern climatological analyses in their hands, it's doubtful they would have been so profligate with water distribution from what really is the only big river in the Pacific Southwest.
Connie Woodhouse and three co-authors have just published an interesting paper that puts the southwestern moisture picture in long-term perspective. It contains some remarkable findings, which includes an obvious transition from domination by persistent and severe drought to relatively wet conditions some five centuries ago. Woodhouse et. al. also show how remarkably wet the 1905-1917 period was.
Use this word in your next presentation: "pluvial." That's what she calls the period. Translation: an era when it rains cats and dogs.
Figure 1. Annual (13-yr smoothed) precipitation anomalies averaged across a nine state region (AZ, CA, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, UT, and WY) in the western United States (adapted from Woodhouse et al., 2005)
That big spike in the beginning of the record is when, in percentage terms, the region experienced the decadal doublings of populations. In the absence of any historical climate data, it's not hard to imaging the glowing letters being sent back east on the Santa Fe: "It's a green paradise here. Y'all come!"
Over the much longer haul, the early 20th century pluvial is a true outlier. Figure 2 shows nearly 1,200 years of the Palmer Drought Severity Index, a pretty standard climatological metric, as calculated from regional tree ring records from moisture-sensitive trees. When the index is low (negative), conditions are dry, and vice-versa.
Nor does there seem to be much relationship to Northern Hemispheric temperatures.
Figure 3. The nearly 2,000-yr long Northern Hemispheric temperature reconstruction from Moberg et al., 2005.
Taking a look at the long-term record recently published by Moberg et al. in Nature (Figure 3), the following rough comparisons can be made:
Period (AD) NH Temperature Western Moisture
800-1000 cool dry
1000-1100 warm dry
1200-1400 cool moderately dry
1400-1900 coolest wet
1900-2000 warm wet
Think about this the next time some talking head glibly associates western drought with global warming.
References:
Moberg, A., et al., 2005. Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data. Nature, 433, 613-617.
Woodhouse C.A., et al., 2005. The twentieth century pluvial in the western United States. Geophysical Research Letters, 32, L07701, doi:10.1029/2005GL02241
Michaels is funded by the fuel industry
Ahem, I think our friend, the author, should disclose that he has received over $160,000 in funding from the fuel industry. At least, that's what I would do, if I was writing a stock article that spoke of future gains in MSFT, after I received a large payment from Microsoft.
It's an integrity thing. Just so we know why he chose to oppose thousands of scientists who all agree that global warming is not just a figment of our imagination.
If he doesn't post a disclaimer, then marching through every scientific article published on global warming, and systematically discrediting the findings, looks very foolish.