If the California drought was due to climate change, there would not have been previous droughts when few people lived there. The link between the current drought and climate change is tenuous (as the NY Times says.) That didn’t stop Obama from linking the two. Politicos on both sides then then jumped in with their own agendas, not bothering to look at inconvenient facts. This obscures and complicates dealing with the drought.
Right wing sites said it was all due to an out of control federal government, conveniently forgetting that without the federal government, most of the vast water projects in the Southwest wouldn’t exist at all. Inhabitat was equally evasive, not even mentioning there is no scientific link between Southwest drought and climate change as they called for immediate action. However, there is clear evidence the Southwest historically and routinely has droughts, which sometimes last for decades, and which were not caused by humans. The current drought could just be part of a normal cycle.
While a trend of increasing drought that may be linked to global warming has been documented in some regions, including parts of the Mediterranean and in the Southwestern United States, there is no scientific consensus yet that it is a worldwide phenomenon. Nor is there definitive evidence that it is causing California’s problems.
Well lookie here, according to climate change projections, California should be getting wetter. Yet clearly it’s not.
In fact, the most recent computer projections suggest that as the world warms, California should get wetter, not drier, in the winter, when the state gets the bulk of its precipitation.
Natural climate change has been hiding in plain sight.
http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com/