Global Warming Caused Western USA "never ending drought" and now is causing flooding

the never-ending thing got politifact treatment

Fact & Fiction: Ending California’s Drought | PolitiFact California

Which may not settle the issue. Seems likely that one could find at least one person connected to climate research who says that some drought will never end. Or that snow will never fall again in Europe (that one was pretty famous ). Concordance of evidence is a better focus.

One might imagine that distractions like this get presented when there is something else going on that we ought not be noticing. But I have not detected such patterns in mojo's pronouncements, More stochastic.

 

In a similar way, one could find a climate skeptic asserting that atmospheric CO2 cannot trap outgoing infrared. Does not invalidate all climate-skeptic arguments. Examine evidence on case-by-case basis. That's the ticket.

 

"cannot can not fathom how the same level of CO2 can cause both drought and flooding in the same regions."@1

If ENSO is involved (as it appears to be), I think this can be fathomed. Most simply, ENSO is an East <-> West sloshing of warm surface waters. Warmer ocean could increase the magnitude of slosh. Two ENSO extremes are related to excess rain or drought in particular regions.

The California hydrology connection is not tightest that can be found, but I am trying to illustrate a general pattern here. There are other periodic ocean sloshes also susceptible to magnification by ocean warming.

My message here is against over simplification of complex systems. If this is an error still being made by climate modelers (about ocean dynamics), ohmigosh don't follow their footsteps!

 

You can occasionally win an argument with a genius.
You can NEVER win an argument with a MORON.

 

As an optimist, I see progress being made here. ENSO is a cycle, with its extremes having opposite effects.Understanding that is progress. Second, the possibility that warmer oceans could intensify ENSO. This starts as an hypothesis, and would be confirmed (or not) by proxies for those two things. Certainly mojo would have no trouble with the idea that ocean had warmer times in the past.

Third part may be the hardest, to understand that +CO2 will (and has and does) cause ocean warming. Nevertheless, with all 3 in place, "unfathomable" 2-way effects can make their way into one's thinking.

Not much hope for progress though, if one gets stuck in purely local world view. On this planet, things are dynamic, linked, and what happens somewhere (even far away) can affect where you are.

Not much hope for progress of one can only see ENSO vs. CO2 as non-taxable vs. taxable. ENSO is part of this dynamic planet. Possibly it can be altered by +CO2. Fossil-burning for energy has a long list of externalities that ought to be fairly weighed. If +CO2 has a net negative effect, it makes sense to control it, and taxation might be chosen as effective.

Ignoring extermalities has a long human history. This does not make it our best future plan.

 

just to add to the politics of drought in california. Friend in San Jose spent money to drop his water usage, and the whole city dropped. Now the utility wants to charge twice as much as before the drought because, people are using less water so they want higher profits.

IMHO from living in california, the drought there is more political than scientific. They have sold more water rights than there is likely water and everyone wants to profit. They have taken a wet time as normal so everything else looks like a drought.

Perhaps North America needs to shift from thirsty crops in California to mexican crops - gulp given the reality of so many people in California. That makes sense scientifically, but the politics is awful. Better to have CARB do a big carbon tax and pretend wet was normal, and california's ghg output not world wide is what should be looked at for climate change. That is at least what the politicians want.

 

Methinks your friend is exaggerating. A quick look at San Jose's 2017 water rate schedule shows that at my household's typical consumption rate (6 ccf every two months), the cost is essentially a wash. And I'm getting my water from a nonprofit, public utility district supplying comparatively local water (nearby mountains), not piping it from very-far-away mountains.
https://sjwater.s3.amazonaws.com/files/documents/Schedule%201%20Jan%202017.pdf

If his water bill has doubled, most of that is from a new serious leak, not from the rate hikes:
2016 Water Rates Frequently Asked Questions | San Jose Water Company

The only part that shocks me is SJ's typical usage:
"For the average customer using 15 units of water ..."
That is more than double my district's average usage before conservation, which in turn was more than double what my household uses now.

No need to shift it all to Mexico. There are still plenty of places in the U.S. with the croplands and water available, and the seasons to grow a fairly good chunk of it. Simply halting the foreign export of water-intensive alfalfa would make a substantial dent in California's long term water problems.

 

According to people who study such things, alfalfa does stand out as a 'thirsty' crop.

6ccf is 600 cubic feet (per two months) right? Perhaps we should have a thread to compare direct water usage by members?

 

1 ccf is 748 gallons, so 6 ccf for two people for a two month billing cycle works out to 37 gallons per person per day.

A decade ago, when I was having a substantial dispute with my water district about their very substantial connection surcharge for merely possessing a residential fire sprinkler system (2.5X the base meter charge of typical non-sprinklered homes, and far more than the actual water usage charge), average residential use in this district was 14 ccf per two month cycle. (After a legislative fight between water departments, fire departments, and the construction industry, my water district dropped that surcharge.)