Exciting news, folks. Thanks to an especially dismal 2021, the 2000-21 megadrought in the Southwest is now the worst on record, barely edging out the infamous 1571-92 megadrought:
But we didn't do this all by ourselves. It was a team effort. If not for climate change, our current megadrought would have been unremarkable, barely even cracking the top five. This just shows what we can accomplish by taking a naturally arid region and then adding a few hundred gigatons of CO2 to the atmosphere. Congratulations to everyone involved.
How, pray tell is any “megadrought” unremarkable?
Perhaps Kevin is saying we wouldn't actually be in a megadrought situation at all, but for climate change.
The relative units on the soil moisture annoys me. Very opaque what this actually refers to, and hard to place in context given that it’s comparing to 12 centuries ago
If it’s standard deviation like I assume, then is it year to year? So is it standard deviations from the mean soil dryness?
At least this particular water year* won't be the worst for you folks, due to all that rainfall you got back in October 2021. Same for us here in northern Utah - even despite getting very meager snowfall in January, we still have a decent snowpack from all the snow we got in November and December.
* Water years are not the same as chronological years (IE "January through December").
The ( ( ( Space Laser ) ) ) is undefeated.
I blame the fascist liberal government. They tell everybody to stop watering their lawns and then everything dries out. What did they expect? If everyone starts watering their lawn every day, this soil moisture problem goes away in no time.
All true, but in Arizona, at least, there was also the diversion of water to the bamboo grow operation as part of the rigging of the 2020 election for the Biden-Harris scampaign.
SO TRUE! It’s just like when they told me to turn my A/C off to prevent global warming. Hello? It’s literally a cold-making machine?
When will these liberal fascists learn
You know what helps keep climate change from getting worse? ELECTRIC RAILROADS AND HIGH SPEED RAIL! LOL.
But really I agree the CA HSR is not going great, but it is a difficult project to pull off if you don't have the correct political environment, https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-cmd/index.html
Americans don't want electric railroads. They want electric cars. You need to watch the movie "singles" and update it.
You post this right when a pattern change happens with the southwest going cool/wet.
Am I crazy to be mildly encouraged by this? It's nice to see that such a pattern exists with previous droughts, and that this would still be a "mega-drought" w/o climate change, because the implication is that there's some reason to expect it to end within a couple/few years.
And liberals in the future must absolutely not criticize Joe Manchin for gutting green energy- why, that, according to Kevin, would be downright uncivil.
Given there have been multiple megadroughts over the last 500 years, how do we know this one is caused by climate change? If the answer is that all of these droughts were caused by climate change, why do we think we can prevent it?
I think the point is that we can estimate the increase in severity due to climate change. We would still be in a drought, but it wouldn’t be so crazy big
I think the “existential crisis” angle is stupid for climate change anyways. We wouldn’t all die (duh), but a changing climate will cost a lot of money, more money than it will take to prevent it. Plus, if we get awesome at making turbines everyone will buy them from us instead of the Chinese. The doomsday scenario isn’t as persuasive to be honest
How do we measure the severity of climate change on a world where the climate is constantly changing. We’ve had two ice ages, at least, followed by the roll back of the ice. Recorded history is a drop in the bucket compared to the actual history of this planet. I’m not saying climate change isn’t a thing. It is. It’s a natural part of earth’s existence and we humans are stuck in the middle of it.
[i]How do we measure the severity of climate change on a world where the climate is constantly changing.[/i]
By the level of disruption of human and ecological systems.
Doesn’t really answer the question.