Climate changes. It changes slower than weather – but it changes. About 15,000 years ago, the ice sheet that covered the place I call home began melting. A couple thousand years after the melt started and the glaciers started receding the Younger Dryas came along with 1300 years of cold. Then it started warming again.
Climate changes. No question about it. Anthropic warming – a little results from every gallon of gas we burn – also exists. It takes a lot of arrogance for someone who is challenged by the quadratic equation (or the calculus) to demand major changes when they can’t work the math.
Judith Curry has quit publishing her blog, Climate Etc. She has also published Climate Uncertainty and Risk -Rethinking Our Response. I’ve been following her work for years – and the fact is, we’re still accumulating climate data. During my lifetime, I’ve seen several hundred year floods on the same rivers. The data wasn’t bad – it was just incomplete. When we project the line from a partial duration series, we’re doing the best we can – and the probability is that we won’t get it right. On flooding, we’re close to getting a hundred years of data on many of our western rivers. On climate here, our records start with Winton Weydemeyer’s observations – and I knew Winton. Basically, we’re into our second generation of watching the local climate. Last frost comes a bit earlier in the Spring, the first frost of Fall is a little later. We can raise sweet corn in Trego – a crop that often failed in the sixties. Climate changes – and our best tool for understanding it is the past record and probability.
The 1941 Yearbook of Agriculture is Climate and Man. The contour lines on page 963 show an average last frost date in our area of June 10, and September 10 as the date for the first frost in the Fall. Lincoln County data was from 3 locations – Fortine, Libby and Upper Yaak. 33 years of data for Fortine, 40 years for Libby, and 22 for Upper Yaak. Brief partial duration series. Now our data sets include over 100 years of data – and are probably more reliable. I type in 59934, and get a last frost date of May16, and a first frost date of September 18, for 125 days of growing season. Did climate change, or was it just getting longer records (likely both).
This morning, Weather.com predicts that the night cold on September 18 will still be 45 degrees. Our delayed last frost would be enough to take the title of Christmas Tree capital away if the industry still existed. Climate has shifted a bit. I still don’t know how much is natural and how much is anthropic – though people with less information have much more certainty.
There’s a war going on in the mid-east – and it seems insignificant. Iran has been in a drought cycle for the past six years or so – and to deal with the problem of drought, they drilled wells. Many wells, into an aquifer that can’t stand the pressure. That aquifer is failing them. Their president has faced that unpleasant fact and talks about moving the capital from Tehran because the day is coming when it won’t have the water it needs. In our own country, we can look at the Ogallala Aquifer’s depletion – or at Phoenix, where the city of 1.7 million can exist only because of water taken from the Colorado.
These are the real crises – populations in areas where there isn’t enough water to support them. I feel for those Iranians – their theocratic government works from the same attitude – “as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.” Kind of dumb – but we have the Ogallala aquifer, and Phoenix, where we have the same situation. Resource depletion is real.
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