The Patriot Post® · California Drought-Busting Rains Sum It Up

By Joe Bastardi ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/47584-california-drought-busting-rains-sum-it-up-2017-02-21

I will be short here because, frankly, there is not much more to say. We are dealing with a relentless opponent on the AGW side who understands that: 1) Most people don’t know what the weather has done before and is capable of doing again simply by its nature; and 2) A compliant press and accepting public has been taught that we are destroying the planet (I call it the “Fern Gully” generation, a movie that was banned in our house for my kids, but I am sure many kids around my kids’ age have seen it).

I grow wary of it all. It’s like knowing what happened before is a detriment, not a benefit. But that is the world we live in today.

So to sum it up: The California perma-drought was temporary. And guess what? Another El Niño is coming (which will be blamed on climate change and play right into alarmists’ hands since a perfectly natural occurrence will then naturally spike the global temperature again), and it’s going to rain more next winter, most likely heavier in the south than north. Why? Because that is what happens much of the time during El Niños.

And guess what? The Texas perma-drought, touted after hot summers that resembled closely the early 1950s, was also temporary.

Anyone want to call alarmists out on this instead of blindly accepting the idea that the same thing they used to forecast a drought was responsible for breaking it?

By the way, the situation in the Pacific is changing as the extreme cold that charged off Asia in the late fall and winter and forced the cold tongue to push east to create a situation conducive to this is fading. As always in nature, there are swings back and forth.

While I have you here, a few things that I am forecasting. Let’s see how it turns out.

  1. We are concerned that for the first time since 2011, this is a bigger than normal severe weather season. Of course, man-made global warming will be blamed for that.

  2. We believe the overall hurricane season, by the objective ACE index, will be less than last year and likely below average. However, the very warm near the U.S. means that storms are most likely to be stronger the closer they are to the coastline than way out at sea, Any storm that hits the U.S. will prompt someone to blame global warming.

  3. Once we break whatever hold invading cold has on March, we should have a very warm U.S. east and south well into the middle of the summer season, though unlike last year, summer may break quicker. Whatever happens, global warming will be blamed.

  4. Next winter, the El Niño shaping up appears to be the kind that we had in ‘02-'03 and '09-'10, which are colder/snowier versions than the '15-'16 version. That too will be blamed on global warming.

Notice I have incorporated the forecast of people blaming global warming, That way I am sure to be right on one aspect of all them. No matter what happens, global warming will be blamed (or as it’s called today, “climate change”).

Now there are four forecasts to look at, and I am sure that if I am wrong (an example being what has happened in the back end of this winter) my feet will be held to the fire. But that is the world I operate in and frankly love since there is a standard. This is far from what I see going on with the other side, where perma-droughts are ostensibly the result of global warming, even though they break for the same reason in their distorted world.

So what has always happened — droughts followed by rain, rain followed by drought — is apparently no longer because of nature.

Such a world is a fantasy world, which unfortunately throws aside real world observation and this cold hard fact: What CO2 is doing now to the climate, given the established record of CO2 and temperature, is arguable if not negligible.

Forecasting perma-droughts based on an agenda should immediately raise questions about the methods and motives of people doing such things.

Here is one thing that is true and always will be. Every drought ends with a lot of rain. Always has, always will.


Joe Bastardi is chief forecaster at WeatherBELL Analytics, a meteorological consulting firm, and contributor to The Patriot Post on environmental issues.