Well which is it folks? Global warming is going to cause an extreme drought, or it's going to cause a rain bonanza? These researchers are starting to get lazy are blaming every change in the wind on warming.
This modeling prediction is in line with what we've observed:
* https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6191539_Detection_o...
* http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/our-changing-climate/...
Climate is not weather, climate is the patterns of weather that are seen. You can ask, "is this year a drought or a rain bonanza" and have it make sense, but it doesn't make sense to say that of the climate; both are possible at different times.
Just two years ago the news was all about how the CA drought was all because of carbon emissions and global warming. At least this paper does not do a full flip-flop and claim the recent precipitation is due to GW. It suggests the future may have higher or lower precipitation and large uncertainty - perhaps large variability due to the region being near a transition. Regardless of what its trying to say, it can be viewed through an AGW lens as "we fucked up last time, but here's why and BTW it's still all from CO2."
My take away is just that modeling this stuff is really hard and they aren't there yet.
For years CA has got worse and worse drought wise - one great year of rain that brought the state back from Exceptional and Extreme drought levels across almost the entire state to still Abnormal or Severe in about 25% of the state is really just a blip.
Like... one year is a data-point, not a pattern, and even if CA gets more rain in the winter it would appear to be getting hotter in the summer which is really not good.
Hasn’t really been the case this year so far.
Plus, again, the rain and weather in winter and spring is record breakingly anomalous this year. So "this year so far" is not really a sane comparison.
The trend overall has been clear. Using this year is like when people say "we had record snowfall in upstate NY this year, so much for global warming, nyuk nyuk". It doesn't follow.
Droughts and heavy rain fit those predictions perfectly.
Politics != Science
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okavango_River [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UscvetL9xc0
On the ground it means we'll see more extremes. Droughts, floods, record breaking heat and cold.
That may be the point, but it's false; before, during, and after the worst of the droughts in CA, scientists were projecting that extreme (relative to past patterns) weather patterns would be more common, that particular regions would see more droughts and others more rain, and they California is geographically positioned so as to be subject to both effects, with an uncertain net effect.
The present article, particularly, does not “call for 100 years of floods”.
It doesn't take a scientist to understand that the more heat that gets trapped in our atmosphere, and the more glaciers and ice caps that melt, the worse off we are going to be. I don't need a scientist to tell me that California might have 100 years of this, or Sahara Desert might turn into a tropical rainforest. It is enough for me to know that this will have a devastating impact on ecological systems across the globe, and the vast majority of people live near water, and sea levels are rising.
I live in a state where the majority of the population is rural and most people are farmers. I ask climate change deniers if they "believe" in greenhouses, and they look at me like I am silly. Then I explain to them that what we are doing is creating a very big green house. This usually does the trick.
I tend to watch a few websites every day to keep tabs on what's happening. There is so much crap being said on both sides that I've reverted to just watching the numbers to see where we are.
My list: http://spaceweather.com/ to watch sunspot activity, http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/ to watch arctic sea ice area and extent and arctic mean temperature, http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/ for monthly temperatures, http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostu... to see where we are in the El Nino/La Nina cycle, http://sealevel.colorado.edu/ to see what the sea level graph is doing.
As a layperson, I always assumed that most weather we experience is in line with historical variability. Climate change causes (or is) small changes in the bias and variance of this weather. Saying that some of the drought is caused by natural variability and some of drought was exacerbated by GHG-induced warming seems like a perfectly consistent and reasonable position.
As a scientist you cannot accept that what you know is the final answer. Our knowledge of the world around us should be constantly subjected to the closest scrutiny, because the answers we have are almost certainly incorrect, or incomplete.
The scientific community is at great fault for not being loud enough about the impact of global warming.