All around the world the climate druids are at work.
Show me the error bars
Once upon a time a scientist talked about thirty year trends and anachronistic things like “confidence intervals”. Now, thanks to the discovery of Unscience, any noisy, random short data is fair game to be declared undeniable climate change. Periods of flooding also qualify, as do periods of nice weather, though strangely no one mentions those. Where are the headlines? If climate change caused drought on the East Coast of Australia, it’s also causing average rain and good crops in Western Australia.
In terms of scientific data analysis we don’t get that many droughts or six-day-August-heatwaves to analyze. They’re complex phenomena caused by multiple factors and we only have short records. This makes them ideal to be oversold to hapless folk as a “sign” of climate change.
When we have data, we find global droughts haven’t changed much in the last 60 years. When we can scratch together longer proxies, we find that 1000 year rainfall studies show droughts and floods used to be longer and worse. In Europe and the US megadroughts happened in the last 2,000 years. The droughts of 1315, or 1540, etc, weren’t due to our SUV’s. In Australia there were eight megadroughts in the last thousand years including one that lasted a whopping 39 years from 1174- 1212AD.
We can’t predict when individual droughts are going to happen, but we *know* they are caused by coal plants.
Megadroughts in Europe that climate models didn’t predict:
….
Megadroughts in Australia the climate models didn’t predict either:
Megadroughts in Australia were much worse
To predict in this sense means to hindcast or explain.
One day in the far flung future, climate models might work and “predict” a past drought that someone can test by looking for it in a proxy record. Imagine that, a falsifiable model?
Cold periods are often the dry periods anyway
Once upon a time in 1974 NOAA blamed global cooling for droughts.
“…the drought is spreading—eastward into Ethiopia and southward into Dahomey, Egypt, Guinea, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia, Tanzania, and Zaire. … Many climatologists have associated this drought and other recent weather anomalies with a global cooling trend
…“… Some climatologists think that if the current cooling trend continues, drought will occur more frequently in India—indeed, through much of Asia, the world’s hungriest continent. … Some climatologists think that the present cooling trend may be the start of a slide into another period of major glaciation, popularly called an “ice age.””
What’s the difference between Rune stones, Tea leaves, Astrology and Climate Science. The first three have a long history.
The renewables industry and climate scare machine prey upon the vulnerable.