Federal bureaucrats are propagating another climate scare this week, claiming their new study shows global warming is causing drought and will soon result in “unprecedented drying.”
The underlying data, however, show the bureaucrats are misrepresenting the results of their study.
Headlined by workers at NASA’s Goddard Institute and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the authors acknowledge, “The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report indicates only low confidence in attributing changes in drought” to global warming.
The authors then set about to try to change that assessment.
The authors utilized soil moisture measurements and computer models in an attempt to discern connection and causation between global warming and drought.
SEE ALSO: NASA: Higher CO2 Levels Responsible For ‘Greening’ Earth
The authors reported drought increased during the early 20th century, some 100 years of global warming ago.
Noting, however, that “a negative trend indicates that the data and [warming] fingerprint are increasingly dissimilar,” the authors acknowledged that “In the middle of the twentieth century, these trends become negative.”
From 1981 through the present, the authors reported, “the signal of greenhouse gas forcing is present but not yet detectable at high confidence.”
The signals were so small, the authors acknowledged, that they “are not detectable at the likely level over background noise.”
SEE ALSO: U.S. Droughts At Historic Lows
In summary, the authors found that between 1950 and 1980, the signal was the opposite of what one would expect if global warming causes drought.
From 1981 through the present, there was a signal so small that it was indistinguishable from background noise.
The only detectable signal connecting warming temperatures and drought was during a period 100 years ago, when temperatures were cooler than today. The warming since then has not caused any detectable drought.
The findings strike a hammer blow against the notion that global warming causes alarming levels of drought or even any detectable drought at all.
SEE ALSO: Paper: Droughts, Heat Waves Are Not Getting Worse Like Alarmists Predicted
People who work at climate change departments for the federal government, however, must keep the notion of a ‘climate crisis’ alive to preserve their apparent importance and their jobs.
So here are a few snippets of how the authors spun the story, according to USA Today:
‘The big thing we learned is that climate change started affecting global patterns of drought in the early 20th century,’ said study co-author Benjamin Cook of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. ‘We expect this pattern to keep emerging as climate change continues.’
Lead author Kate Marvel, a climate modeler at Goddard and Columbia University, said, ‘It’s mind-boggling. There is a really clear signal of the effects of human greenhouse gases on the hydroclimate.’
‘All the models are projecting that you should see unprecedented drying soon, in a lot of places,’ Marvel said.
Actually, we are only seeing unprecedented alarmism, everywhere taxpayer dollars are to be had.
Read more at CFACT
Odd how they bring this study out just as the United States shows no place in drought condition. Going into this winter much of Colorado and California were in various stages of drought but with one of the snowiest seasons in many years they show no place in drought.
It’s like claiming we will soon be roasting just as we have the coldest winter in years. Oops!
This is case where climate alarmists come to conclusions not supported by the information in their report. They attributed drought trends as starting near the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, at that time the carbon dioxide level had only risen a little above pre-industrial levels. The fact is there is no relationship between droughts and CO2.