Finally an explanation about what looks like global cooling

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If you want to call it panic, feel free, but it's a good idea to stare reality in the face. Look at the huge drought. What do you do if it continues to increase? These are serious issues that are going to impact millions of people.

Can you really continue with this false belief you can do whatever you want all the time without there ever being any kind of consequence. Everything you do garnishes a reaction.

The reality is that this drought is not caused by climate change. It has everything to do with conditions in the Pacific that are, as far as we can tell, unrelated to Global Warming.

But let me scare you a little more. Or it would if you weren't so wedded to the notion of Global Warming.

If I remember correctly, the last time that the southwest suffered such a drought was in the period leading into what is known as "the Little Ice Age". If you are going to worry about something, it would be far more rational to worry that we are going to see a major cooling such as in the Little Ice Age. You would at least have history on your side, then.

Remember that a cooling means a less productive Earth. How do you feel about grinding tree bark to make flour so that you have something to eat?

There is definitely no global cooling- a slowdown in warming, maybe- but it definitely hasn't stopped warming. Global warming deniers use faulty arguments , such as comparing say 2011 to 1998 and saying that the fact that 1998 was warmer disproves global warming. When you fit a trend to the data on a multidecadal scale, there is a clear cut warming trend. The 2010s have, on average seen warmer global temperature anomalies than the 2000s so far, and the 2000s were as a whole warmer than the 90s, which were warmer than the 80s, which were in turn warmer than the 70s.

Year to year blips are driven by relatively short term factors such ENSO (el nino/la nina). The fact that 1998 was warmer than most years in the 2000s is simply because 1998 began with the strongest el nino on record. To understand why el nino years and the year following them (1998) are often warmer than neutral years , you need to realize that only surface/near surface temperatures are taken into account during global temperature anomaly calculations.The ocean has a large reservoir of warm water below the surface in the west and central Pacific (warm water can be found for several hundred meters below the surface)- and during el nino, the tropical Pacific's reservoir is partially discharged - causing this "hidden heat" to be realized at the surface and included in the calculations of global temperature anomaly. This effect is not permanent and el nino cannot explain the long term increase in global temperature- though it can explain away the "record years in the past that were warmer than the present".

Now the belief that global warming is "just a cycle" is just not logical. For one, there hasn't been an observed cycle of the sort that would explain the observed global warming trend. But that fact still leaves room to think that there may be such a cycle which , because of its long period of 200 years or so, simply hasn't been observed. But this would be hard to believe once you take into account the fact that global climate simulation models very nearly agree with the observed warming trend when they include the increase in greenhouse gases, but do not show the observed warming trend when the increase in greenhouse gases is not included.

Last edited by GoofyGreatDane on 02 Mar 2015, 7:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

As soon as things turn around, I'll believe you. Until then, it's a question mark, as far as I am concerned and we should prepare for the worst until we have evidence something else is occurring, as in, the lakes get more water in them instead of just evaporating more and more each summer.

Good luck waiting, the southwest is filled with dry lake beds, Playas, that dried out before the last drought, long before, but were huge thousands of years ago.

Fifteen years into a drought when the last one lasted 800 years, water demand exceeding supply for the last fifty years, ground water pumped dry, Arizona is expected to be water free in twenty years.

Everything is warmer than the 70s, we were expecting an ice age. The 50s and the 30s were warm.

I remember the Membris and the Anasazi, irrigated farming, great pottery, but the survivors moved to the Rio Grand.

Water defines the west. A lot of it is routed to southern California, where they use it once and dump it in the ocean.

What is local is given to cows, forty gallons a day each.

The Ogallala Aquifer was filled by the last ice age, and has been pumped dry to irrigate growing crops in the desert.

The Rio Grande does not reach the Gulf. Nor does the Yallu in China. The Nile is not the river it was. More up stream users, dams stopping the floods, and sewer water is being reclaimed to drink.

Also in southern Russia, the Arial Sea is gone, the Caspian Sea reduced by half.

Worldwide, fresh water is becoming scarce.

Nothing more in addition to what? The only thing we can do is adapt, as we have been doing since the dawn of man. Nothing has changed. The changing climate hasn't changed either. The only constant is change.

Where I live, folks aren't accustomed to having scarce water supplies. It may be the southwest, but like I posted before, drive through each of the southwestern states. They have different climates. I grew up in a temperate subtropical climate which appears to be dwindling into a dry, arid one yet the urbanization is modeled on one in a temperate subtropical region.
States like New Mexico have existed in an arid region for quite some time so their urban areas and population reflect that. They do not have as many people and I didn't see one herd of cattle when I drove across the state and spent the night in Albuquerque. Didn't see any on the way back, either. A few hundred miles to the east, there's acres of live stock that have flourished in a savanna like setting decades and cities that have sprawled based on the same. Many of them have already been sold and the industry has been hit hard. That doesn't address the water needs of the cities. either, which will struggle if the surface water gets scarcer and the aquifers continue to recede due to what looks like drought and constant irrigation of farm land.

The reality is that playas have never been any kind of more or less permanent lake beds. They are very shallow. It doesn't even take a drought to dry them out.

For what it's worth, the nearest playa to home is approximately two miles away. It often had water in it when I was a kid, but that was entirely because of irrigation runoff. Now that the owner of that land (who I grew up with) uses sprinklers for irrigation instead of row irrigation, water in the playa is quite rare.



I'm not sure what 800 year drought you are talking about? Maybe in the Atacama? Certainly not in the desert southwest.



If a cow drank 40 gallons of water a day, it would quickly die from hyponatremia. For a fully grown cow or bull, figure about half that.



First of all, it hasn't been pumped dry. There are places where it is dry, but that is still a small percentage (not sure how much, but I'd be surprised if it was even close to 5%).

Second, only about 15% of the water in the Ogallala is thought to be recoverable with water pumps.



I don' tknow about the Yallu or the Nile, but the Rio Grande does reach the Gulf. The flow is far less than years ago, but it still flows.

A few hundred miles to the east of Albuquerque would be Texas. Are you really calling this a Savanna? Around here, we call it prairie.

The amount of irrigation is indeed worrying. My family had one of the first irrigation wells in our county. Even though it was far from dry (it could easily handle the main part of the farm, we shut it down in the early 1980s and the farm is now strictly dryland. Interestingly enough, you tend to make about the same profit either way since the cost of pumping enough water to cover a section (square mile) is very high.

West Texas (specifically the panhandle) is more like a transitional-type topography, between grasslands and canyons/desert, although it could be prairie like in places. I thought it looked too barren to be one when I drove through it on I-40. To be honest, I thought it was just in the way of New Mexico, which is far more interesting looking, and it was a chore to drive through it to get to the treat on the other side.

I wouldn't call it a prairie, exactly, although others might. You will find a true prairie in northern Oklahoma and Kansas. It is the same one Laura Ingalls-Wilder wrote about. Her family once lived there but were forced to move after the government ruled whites couldn't settle there. She describes how tall the grass was in Little House on The Prairie.

http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/re ... eserve.xml

Huh!

The pastures of the Panhandle of Texas are very much prairie. The grass was quite high in the old days and still is in isolated areas.

I've seen it and it looks transitional to me, a cross between grasslands and what's in New Mexico, which is desert.

That's what happens when you get your idea of what is prairie from tv.

Last edited by eric76 on 06 Mar 2015, 11:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think it's unique to witness that transition, the way two ecosystems blend into each other but when you look at what's in The Land Of Enchantment, and having to drive hundreds of miles across the prairie/desert of the Texas Panhandle...it can get monotonous. Then you have that sprawler Amarillo although I like the layout. Seems most anything a traveler needs is right there, on the way. It is convenient.

I've never seen any desert in the Texas Panhandle and I've been all over it.

That's because it isn't completely desert. Just transition and when you get into New Mexico, then the desert hits you hard. Ever notice the moment you cross the border it's completely different looking? That's what's so neat about New Mexico. You don't get to see any of those funky rocks until you cross over into the Land of Enchantment. New Mexico is the neatest state! Incredible!