Scientists, Media Admit Recent California Weather Not Historically Unusual
The Los Angeles Times and The Seattle Times posted articles reporting that scientists are acknowledging recent weather conditions on the West Coast, including swings from drought to atmospheric rivers causing flooding, are natural for the region.
This is true and demonstrates an accurate understanding of historical records for the state.
Unfortunately, amidst the factual reporting, the paper could not resist asserting extreme weather events will become more common or worse in the future due to ‘climate change’. Trend data does not support such claims.
Writer Louis Sahagún’s story, carried in both papers, discusses recent West Coast weather “swings” with the official climatologist of California and other scientists.
The scientists interviewed said such weather events have been common historically, as Sahagún writes:
Although the media and some officials were quick to link a series of powerful storms to climate change, researchers interviewed by The Times said they had yet to see evidence of that connection.
Instead, the unexpected onslaught of rain and snow after three years of punishing drought appears akin to other major storms that have struck California every decade or more since experts began keeping records in the 1800s.
As covered in Climate Realism’s “Wrong, Washington Post – History and Data Contradict Claims of Worsening Atmospheric Rivers,” meteorologist Anthony Watts thoroughly debunks the claim made by the WaPo that atmospheric rivers have become more extreme as the climate has changed.
Watts wrote:
Regarding storms that depend on the global atmospheric water cycle, real-world data shows that there has been no increase in flooding; no increase in tropical cyclones and hurricanes; no increase in winter storms; and no increase in thunderstorms or tornadoes, or associated hail, lightning, and extreme winds from thunderstorms.
Further, a peer-reviewed paper published in 2020 used satellite and sounding data and found there has been no trend influencing tropical lower stratospheric water vapor, in the region [in which] these West Coast atmospheric rivers originate.
The scientists interviewed by the Los Angeles Times acknowledge the fact that extreme weather and shifts between types of extreme weather events have been common throughout California’s history.
For example, a senior hydrologist for the National Weather Service in Los Angeles told Sahagún that the recent atmospheric river event was “nothing as big as what we’ve gone through before” and Sahagún goes on to explain that massive flooding events have happened in the region as long as records have been kept.
Another scientist interviewed concurred that recent extreme weather events “don’t hold a candle to the kinds of extreme, prolonged storms of the last century [.]”
Rather than ending the story on that informative note, unfortunately, Sahagún and the scientists he interviewed entered the prognostication game saying, “models predict more frequent mega-storms fueled by warming oceans and a thirstier atmosphere.”
These claims are refuted by the fact that as the Earth has already warmed for more than a hundred years, there is no evidence or data indicating a change in the trend of the extreme weather events discussed in the story.
As Climate Realism has discussed here, here, and here, among dozens of other instances covering media falsehoods about periods of drought and intense precipitation in the western United States, and especially California, these “swings” are part of the natural cycles of the region.
In 2013, the U.S. Geological Survey even published research that showed massive flooding events caused by atmospheric river conditions hammer California approximately every 200 years, and that “smaller forms of these rivers regularly hit California, as well as the western coasts of other countries.”
The Los Angeles Times and The Seattle Times should be applauded for accurately reporting that recent droughts and atmospheric river events are perfectly natural occurrences that have impacted that state with some regularity throughout its history.
Such factual reporting should arm public officials with the background they need to implement policies that improve the state’s water infrastructure so that during wet periods more water is stored and available for use when future droughts occur, rather than having water just flow to the sea.
By the same token, it is fair to critique the two papers for shifting the news story from one that is straightforward and informative to another in a long line of unsupported, alarming climate fairy tales.
See more here climatechangedispatch
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
Terry Shipman
| #
Climate alarmists bank on the fact that many people have no interest in or even a cursory knowledge of history. I’ll never forget a question asked of a woman on the streets of New York City. “Which side won the American Civil War?”
Her answer, framed in the form of a question, was “France?”
Historical ignorance is a weapon that climate alarmists make daily use of. As one who has a degree in history this makes me sick. Recently the assertion was made that the last 20 years were warmer than the 1930’s. Many bought that hook line and sinker. Yes, sickening.
Reply
Jerry Krause
| #
Hi Terry,
You concluded: “Historical ignorance is a weapon that climate alarmists make daily use of. As one who has a degree in history this makes me sick. Recently the assertion was made that the last 20 years were warmer than the 1930’s. Many bought that hook line and sinker. Yes, sickening.”
Why didn’t you, a historian who seems to know the meteorological history of the 30’s and that of the last 20 years, attempt to compare what you know so we readers of PSI articles and comments would not be ignorant of what the alarmist are doing.
As it is we only know about you and not anything about the weather of the 30’s and the weather of the last 20 years. Give PSI Readers some ammunition with which they can fight back if they are so inclined.
Have a good day, Jerry
Reply
Terry Shipman
| #
Jerry,
One of the best places to look is Tony Heller’s realclimatescience.com. He has a wealth of historical climate research. I told him in comments that he missed his calling as he would have made an excellent historian. He has years of research stored on his site. Want to know about the 1930’s? Check his site. He reproduces period newspaper and magazine articles that show the weather for the period plus unaltered temperature records for the period. Want proof that the late 70’s cooling scare was real? He has it. Time Magazine had articles about the cooling scare. Climate alarmists today try to deny that the cooling scare ever took place. But it did and history proves it did.
Reply
Jerry Krause
| #
Hi Terry and PSI Readers.
Terry could reply: Jerry, have you read the article? The article began: “The Los Angeles Times and The Seattle Times posted articles reporting that scientists are acknowledging recent weather conditions on the West Coast, including swings from drought to atmospheric rivers causing flooding, are natural for the region.”
“Atmospheric Rivers” are the central theme of this “long” and “detailed” article. A fact, not mentioned, is that most meteorologists (atmospheric scientists) were not aware of these atmospheric rivers until after WWII.
Any PSI Reader can click on this link (https://www.accuweather.com/en/us/salem/97301/weather-radar/330144) and then click on the “negative” sign, so these atmospheric rivers over the entire earth (excluding the polar regions) from which precipitation has been falling for an hour or so, can viewed and it seen how these rivers have moved during this hour or so.
And it might not take a PSI Reader long to see that normally most of the daily (hourly) precipitation falls over water and not over land, where flooding can occur. And what needs to be addressed is that flooding problems only occurs over land that is not a nearly level former dry lake bed.
Maybe I am wrong, but I believe that any PSI Reader who spends a few minutes each day looking at these atmospheric rivers will “understand” what they see and not be influenced by those who pretend to know more than a common PSI Reader.
Have a good day, Jerry
Reply