As this year comes to a close the usual suspects—within the media and among the most corrupt of the alleged scientists peddling the scare of CAGW—are already declaring 2014 the hottest year ever. The cause? Climate Change. Yes, climate change causes climate change! Elsewhere, according to Doyle Rice in USA Today) some scientists who have actually looked at evidence blame California’s persistent drought on natural variability:
Natural weather patterns and climate variability, not man-made global warming, are causing the historic drought that’s parching California, says a study out today from federal scientists.
“It’s important to note that California’s drought, while extreme, is not an uncommon occurrence for the state,” said Richard Seager, report lead author and professor with Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. The report, “Causes and Predictability of the 2011-14 California Drought,” was sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The report did not appear in a [pre-publication] peer-reviewed journal, but was reviewed by other NOAA scientists.
“In fact, multi-year droughts appear regularly in the state’s climate record, and it’s a safe bet that a similar event will happen again,” he said.
The persistent weather pattern over the past several years has featured a warm, dry ridge of high pressure over the eastern North Pacific Ocean and western North America. Such high-pressure ridges prevent clouds from forming and precipitation from falling.
The current study notes that this ridge—which has resulted in decreased rain and snowfall since 2011—is almost opposite to what computer models predict will result from human-induced climate change.
Naturally, a serial liar, and one of the world’s prominent propagandists for the pseudo-scientific conjecture of CAGW, the rather vexatious Michael Mann, had to express denial:
“The authors of the new report would really have us believe that is merely a coincidence and has nothing to do with the impact of human-caused climate change?” Penn State meteorologist Michael Mann wrote in the Huffington Post Monday.“Frankly, I don’t find that even remotely plausible.”
It could be interesting, one day, to list all all things which that fraudulent fellow does find plausible—the survival of the Loch Ness monster and the sway of reptilian aliens among us, a fair observed might expect—versus all the facts, verities, truths and the concept of the null hypothesis which he indubitably regards as implausible.
Mann cites the fact that the NOAA report focuses primarily on the lack of precipitation, not the unusually high temperatures that have been measured in the oceans as well as across the state of California. […]
Peer-reviewed studies are divided on whether the drought can be blamed on climate change.
Ah, yes, we cannot be certain whether climate change could be blamed on climate change—for, after all, droughts may lead to droughts! Perhaps the rather silly but lucripetous Dr. Mann ought to have paid more attention to The Hockey Schtick rather than to his own thoroughly worn comfort-object, the spurious hockey stick:
A paper published in Living Reviews of Solar Physics finds from 2 cosmogenic isotope proxies that solar activity at the end of the 20th century was at the highest levels of the past 1200 years. Many other papers also confirm that solar activity reached a Grand Solar Maximum at the end of the 20th century. However, according to the IPCC, this has nothing to do with 0.7C of global warming since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850.
