Bombshell: Study Ties Epic California Drought, ‘Frigid East’ To Manmade Climate Change

[MindMover]

Source: Think Progress

Natural variability alone cannot explain the extreme weather pattern that has driven both the record-setting California drought and the cooler weather seen in the Midwest and East this winter, a major new study finds.

We’ve reported before that climate scientists had predicted a decade ago that warming-driven Arctic ice loss would lead to worsening drought in California. In particular, they predicted it would lead to a “blocking pattern” that would shift the jet stream (and the rain it could bring) away from the state — in this case a “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” of high pressure.

A new study in Geophysical Research Letters (subs. req’d) takes the warming link to the California drought to the next level of understanding. It concludes, “there is a traceable anthropogenic warming footprint in the enormous intensity of the anomalous ridge during winter 2013-14, the associated drought and its intensity.”

The NASA-funded study is behind a pay wall, but the brief news release, offers a simple explanation of what is going on. The research provides “evidence connecting the amplified wind patterns, consisting of a strong high pressure in the West and a deep low pressure in the East [labeled a 'dipole'], to global warming.” Researchers have “uncovered evidence that can trace the amplification of the dipole to human influences.”

Read more: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/04/15/3426810/california-drought-climate-change/

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Maybe we can start having a real discussion now ....

[marions ghost]

1. It's turning out just as predicted...

chart from the UN study

[mpcamb]

2. "The NASA-funded study is behind a pay wall,..."

Don't wanna sound like the dumb guy in the back row, but what's a pay wall?

[MindMover]

3. You have to pay to get the study or article ... this is the new capitalistic method ...

to restrict information to the privileged .... and many times our tax dollars pay for the research, so we pay twice ....

I am sorry, I did not know .... and welcome to DU ...

sometimes just waiting a few days, it sometimes becomes public/peon info ...

[Control-Z]

4. Paid access.

Subscription access only.

[A Little Weird]

5. Oops - already answered

I forget what fast posters are here.

[bananas]

6. They put up a wall and make you pay to get to the content on the other side.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paywall

Paywall
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A paywall is a system that prevents Internet users from accessing webpage content without a paid subscription.[1] There are both "hard" and "soft" paywalls in use. "Hard" paywalls allow minimal to no access to content without subscription, while "soft" paywalls allow more flexibility in what users can view without subscribing, such as selective free content and/or a limited number of articles per month, or the sampling of several pages of a book or paragraphs of an article. Newspapers have been implementing paywalls on their websites to increase their revenue, which has been diminishing due to a decline in print subscriptions and advertising revenue.[2]

<snip>

[Agony]

7. abstract

"
Abstract
The 2013-14 California drought was accompanied by an anomalous high-amplitude ridge system. The anomalous ridge was investigated using reanalysis data and the Community Earth System Model (CESM). It was found that the ridge emerged from continual sources of Rossby wave energy in the western North Pacific starting in late summer, and subsequently intensified into winter. The ridge generated a surge of wave energy downwind and deepened further the trough over the northeast U.S., forming a dipole. The dipole and associated circulation pattern is not linked directly with either ENSO or Pacific Decadal Oscillation; instead it is correlated with a type of ENSO precursor. The connection between the dipole and ENSO precursor has become stronger since the 1970s, and this is attributed to increased GHG loading as simulated by the CESM. Therefore, there is a traceable anthropogenic warming footprint in the enormous intensity of the anomalous ridge during winter 2013-14, the associated drought and its intensity.
"

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL059748/abstract

[cprise]

8. K&R

[caraher]

9. You can read the preprint for free

A preprint is on one author's web page

[Divernan]

13. Totally funded by US Dept. of Energy/NASA/state university

Absolutely outrageous that this report is behind a pay wall, since ALL the funding and the employers of all the researchers are state/federal funded.
Your link identifies the research authors as:
S.-Y. Simon Wang, Lawrence Hipps, Robert R Gillies,and Jin-Ho Yoon, from Utah State University in Logan, UT, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, of Richland, Washington.

Checking out the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_National_Laboratory

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is one of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, managed by the Department of Energy's Office of Science. The main campus of the laboratory is in Richland, Washington.

PNNL scientists conduct basic and applied research and development to strengthen U.S. scientific foundations for fundamental research and innovation; prevent and counter acts of terrorism through applied research in information analysis, cyber security, and the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction; increase the U.S. energy capacity and reduce dependence on imported oil; and reduce the effects of human activity on the environment. PNNL has been operated by Battelle Memorial Institute since 1965.[1]

The study is further designated as "funded by NASA". So how in hell can the results be "by subscription only"?

Thanks for getting behind that paywall for DU.

[caraher]

14. That's the academic publishing industry as it's evolved

There's ever-increasing pressure for open access - my school's faculty just voted this week to adopt an open access policy but with an opt-out clause in recognition of the career pressure on pre-tenure faculty whose work may need to appear in a certain prestigious journal that won't play ball.

But you're right that we should have access to any published results we've already paid for. I don't think many academics are enamored of this system either, given that it often means not only paying to publish their own work but that they often cannot control it.

The debate and vote were particularly poignant as the daughter of two of our faculty members is the person who found Aaron Swartz dead. Remarkably, the vote was not unanimous... the objections raised were rather fuzzy ones based less on the policy than the language, one colleague expressing hesitation about words endorsing the open access movement generally and decrying having a profit motive in play when it comes to disseminating research results.

[Divernan]

15. His death was such a tragedy & loss of a fine human being. RIP, Aaron.

Aaron Swartz, a celebrated internet freedom activist and early developer of the website Reddit, has died at 26.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-21001452

In a statement later on Saturday, Mr Swartz's family praised his "brilliance" and "profound" commitment to social justice and also expressed bitterness toward the prosecutors pursuing the case against him.

"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach," the statement said.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee - the British inventor of the world wide web - commemorated Mr Swartz in a Twitter post: "Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/22/3898584/aaron-swartz-profile-memory-to-myth

“Politics is in user space.”

Aaron, I’ve learned, had a way of implicating you, as a person, as an ethical being, as a social agent embedded in a wider world, through issues that could be seen as “just” about technology, law, or policy. At Aaron's memorial, Quinn said “he lived a life of thought and action, and that is the rarest thing in this world, in this moment in history, to marry thoughts with actions.” You can parse that in multiple ways: a boy who had a brain and a heart, who had strongly-reasoned beliefs about what technology was for and the computing skills to put his ideals into practice.
We should be uncomfortable. We should be asking better questions. We should see nothing as inevitable.

At his memorial, Swartz's friend and Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls described Aaron’s duality with a computing metaphor:

Geeks tend to avoid the legal stuff. They tend to not want to screw with it. They tend to not want to deal with the politics. Linus Torvalds would say, “I only do kernel space. I don’t do user space.” Politics is in user space. Justice is in user space. Aaron was in both. And there are so few geeks that stand out and go that extra step, to defend the rest of us, to look out into the future and see what needs to be, and work on that, on making that happen... We need to do the work that he started.

[Ilsa]

10. No, it's just Jesus blowing the wet weather further east. nt

[Plucketeer]

11. Amen!

God's testing the will and faith of us Californians to determine which of us will join him in heaven!

[Brigid]

12. I am just shocked by this. Shocked, I tell you.

Do you think people will listen now??

[Alhena]

16. My question with regard to this is ...

why didn't this phenomenon occur in past years, since global warming has been with us for decades?

[Bandit]

18. Yes Global Warming has been ongoing for decades but it is building up speed

It started slow but gets faster and faster as time goes by. We are going to witness some dramatic changes in the very near future. It is like compound interest, at first it doesn't seem so bad but it keeps compounding...

[olddad56]

20. it was an enviormental issue when I was in college in the early 70s.

you think that there are climate deniers now, think about then.

And it is all pretty much unfolding as predicted back then, only a much more rapid pacer.

People are going from "I don't believe it is real" to "Well, it is too late now to do anything about it now."

[Laelth]

17. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[Auntie Bush]

19. Kick! More people need to read this. nt