California’s recent drought has many people, including policymakers, looking to point the finger at global warming. The authors of several recent scientific papers aren’t so sure.
A report by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society compiled the work of 20 research groups studying extreme weather events from 2013. The report concluded “that natural variability likely played a much larger role” in droughts, heavy rain, and storms than did man-made warming. In some of the research, if human influence did play a role, it “cannot be distinguished from natural climate variability.”
The report included three papers analyzing the drought in California and the role global warming may have played in it. The first study, by a team from Stanford University, concluded that warming increases the probability of the atmospheric conditions that would decrease precipitation in California.
But a second study, by Hailan Wang and Siegfried Schubert of NASA, said the atmospheric conditions causing low precipitation also make it more likely to be humid. This study compared the periods 1871–1970 and 1980–2013 and concluded that “dry climate extremes over California…are unlikely influenced appreciably by the long-term warming trend since the late 19th century.”
The third study, by a team from UCLA and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, found that using climate models to remove warming “did not increase the…precipitation over California in a statistically significant manner; thus our results do not indicate that this long-term warming trend contributed substantially to the 2013 and 2014 drought events.”
Unfortunately, global warming and California’s terrible drought have been used more than once as a pretext for bad policy from the municipal level all the way up to the federal level.These policies often attempt to drive out affordable and efficient energy sources like coal, natural gas, and nuclear power to feed the less efficient, more costly sacred cows of wind and solar power. The consequence is real harm to American families with no meaningful environmental benefit.
One question needs to be asked: Why have governments sacrificed everyday realities for a hypothetical future that has yet to be backed by observable data? As of this month, it has been 18 years since the world saw an increase in temperatures—even as global carbon dioxide emissions have increased. If there were warming, these policy proposals would have no almost no impact on global temperature.
Regrettably, reactionary government policies to an alleged global warming problem may be making California’s bad situation worse.
Thomas D. Lee is currently a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation. For more information on interning at Heritage, please click here.
