The recent onslaught of rain and snow finally brought much-needed relief to northern California, ending a punishing five-year drought, federal officials said Thursday. Stations up and down the Sierra mountain chain reported twice the amount of normal rain and snow for this time of year after snowstorms doubled the vital snowpack there that provides the state with much of its year-round water supply. However, much of southern California remains dry, though most not at the most severe level of drought. Only 2% of the state is in that category of “exceptional” drought: an area that stretches from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. —USA Today, 13 January 2017
The recent drought in California has also been repeatedly linked to man-made climate change, although as other researchers have pointed out, since current conditions in that state don’t appear to be part of a long-term trend it is hard to see the logic in the claims. Making claims about current droughts is fraught with difficulty for environmentalists, because of the likelihood that a return to wetter conditions will leave them looking foolish. –Andrew Montford, Global Warming Policy Forum, 13 January 2017
The graphic shows that the current drought in California is not exceptional by any stretch of the imagination. We know that rainfall levels in recent years, though low, are not unprecedented as far as the 20th Century is concerned. But, of course, one factor in determining the severity of drought is temperature. To put recent temperatures into historical context, it is worth revisiting the work of V C La Marche & V Markgraf, both experts on past climate. Their data shows just how much higher the Californian tree line was in the Middle Ages, and before, and therefore how much higher temperatures were. The reality is that California has been hotter and drier for much of its recent history. –Paul Homewood, Not A Lot of People Know That, 16 September 2015
California was stuck in a deep drought during Gov. Jerry Brown’s first term, much like the one the state is currently going through. The only difference is that global cooling, not warming, was blamed for causing drought in the late 1970s. In 1976, the New York Times reported that California was “so dry, brush fires have started several weeks early” and that “water is being rationed.” The Times reported that climatologists “believe that the climate has moved into a cooling cycle, which means highly erratic weather for decades to come.” California’s Gov. Brown, who is serving out his fourth term, is once again presiding over a state mired in drought. Brown hasn’t changed his mind much since then. This time though, he’s worried that global warming could deplete California’s water supplies. –Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 4 May 2015
The ink was hardly dry on the Secretarial Order from Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell blaming California’s drought on global warming that rain and snow swept across the state. San Francisco International Airport was forced to cancel flights and there were blizzard warnings for Lake Tahoe. After years of predicting that California’s future would be a barren desert, the predictions have been slightly revised. California is now doomed to alternate between droughts and storms. And if it rains cats and dogs over Death Valley, we will be told that Global Warming causes canine and feline precipitation and that unless we agree to give Al Gore more money, we’re doomed to be brained by falling felines. –Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine, 12 January 2017
