This year, the popular music festival Burning Man, which is held in the Black Rock Desert area of Nevada, was interrupted by a rainstorm that left many participants stranded.
Wired and The Conversation among other media outlets, attributed the rainstorm as well as the heat wave the area experienced a few weeks prior, to human-caused climate change. [emphasis, links added]
This is false.
The recent rains were made more intense by the aftermath of Hurricane Hilary, and neither “monsoon” rains nor heat waves are unprecedented or even rare in the region.
In a story posted by Wired, “Climate Change Has Finally Come for Burning Man,” contributor Chris Stokel-Walker writes the downpour that trapped many festivalgoers was caused by climate change. He wrote:
Extreme weather wrought by climate change, which is resulting in increasing amounts of rain being dumped on the southwestern US states at this time of year.
“These sorts of heavy summer rainfall events in the region are expected, as the well-known southwestern summer monsoon is expected to yield larger amounts of rainfall in a warming climate,” says Michael Mann, presidential distinguished professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Earth and Environmental Science.
A piece in The Conversation took a more balanced approach, pointing out that bad weather striking a festival isn’t new, that “[t]he legendary 1969 Woodstock festival in New York State was also a mud pit.”
Along with reasonably suggesting that festival planners take potential weather problems into account, The Conversation unfortunately also claims that “[a]s we heat the planet, we’re getting more frequent, intense and longer-lasting heat waves across the world. We also know we’re seeing more and more intense short-duration downpours which cause flash flooding.”
These claims are also false.
To Dr. Mann and Wired’s credit, the summer monsoon is a real season in the southwest, and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has “high confidence” that precipitation in general has increased over the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.
This has not led to more flooding, however, according to the IPCC as discussed in Climate at a Glance: Floods.
Heat waves likewise do not appear to be getting worse in the United States, and data show that most of the U.S., including parts of Nevada, have seen fewer unusually hot days, as shown in the post “Media Chases ‘Climate Enhanced’ Heat Waves, Misses Data Showing They are Less Frequent.”
Hurricane Hilary, discussed in the Climate Realism post “No, BBC, Hurricane Hilary Was Not Unprecedented,” undoubtedly had an impact on the amount of rainfall Burning Man saw this year as the remnants of the storm moved inland from its landfall as a tropical storm in Southern California.
The monsoon season is a regular event known to scientists and nearby residents. Also, this isn’t the first time Burning Man was disturbed by a downpour.
A brief Google search reveals many articles and blog posts from as far back as 2000 that describe rain around the same time of year creating sticky, impassible mud.
Anyone who operates an outdoor festival in the desert Southwest during the monsoon season should not be surprised to get heavy amounts of rain on occasion.
This particularly sticky, slippery mud is also a known feature of the dry lakebed where Burning Man takes place.
Its primary composition is gypsum, silica, and bentonite-clay-type dirt that can form famous white-out dust storms when dry, and soak up water and turn into particularly sticky mud when wet. When it rains – and rains hard – in the desert, a dry lakebed is not the place to be.
As discussed many times by Climate Realism here, here, and here, for example, these kinds of drought and deluge patterns are normal for the region; desert rain does not soak easily into the ground, it runs off and collects, leading to flooding, including dangerous flash floods.
While there were certainly unsafe and unsanitary conditions at Burning Man this year, the weather that led to it is not unprecedented.
Burning Man has been rained out before, and none of the conditions that led to the situation can be honestly attributed to human emissions of carbon dioxide, as outlets like Wired and The Conversation are implying when they claimed this kind of rainfall is indicative of climate change.
Data does not show that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent or intense in the Southwest United States. Climate change can’t be causing weather changes that data shows aren’t occurring.
Top image via YouTube/screencap
Read more at Climate Realism
I expect that people who attend alt – culture events like Burning Man believe that sacrifices must be made in order to fight global warming / climate change. Look at the top photo. I don’t see wind turbines or solar panels, just a bunch of heavy, fuel thirsty vehicles. Gaia recognizes hypocrites when she sees them, so she glued them to the desert floor.
I agree that the climate change movement is full of hypocrites who want others to make sacrifices. However, we might want to give those attending this event a little slack. Burning Man provided no showers. Showers such a solar showers were not allowed because it wasn’t permitted to leave the water on the ground. The only way to shower there was to have access to an RV type vehicle with a holding tank for grey water.
Wired is sounding more like Fiction then facts but the rest of the M.S. Media are total Fiction
Bentonite has it’s uses. An example? Dusted onto the clothing of western movie background “extras”. (Personal experience.)
Funny. My uncle lived in Albuquerque when How the West Was Won was filmed. He got to drive some railway spikes.
We all know that Albuquerque is that place that Bugs Bunny is always missing to take that left turn at
“The Gundown”. I’m a ‘Townperson’. The interesting name in the cast, Jay Gammons. If you remember the funeral in “Rio Bravo”, Jay was the drummer boy.