From CFACT
By Joe Bastardi|
The drought in the West will persist until the La Niña base state changes. And that won’t happen until the forcing causing the distorted warming changes. And there is no reason to believe it will happen, even if nations decide to commit economic suicide via net zero.
But what is the La Niña Base State? It is a climate Le Chatelierian response to the warming. Remember what Le Chatelier’s principle says:
Le Chatelier’s principle states that if a dynamic equilibrium is disturbed by changing conditions, the position of equilibrium shifts to counteract the change and reestablish equilibrium.
This is obvious when we look at the Multivariate ENSO Index, which, since the great El Niño of 1997-98, has been more negative than positive.
The climate debate has prostituted the physical meaning of this. People on my side of the AGW issue try to push the idea that a La Niña has a cooling impact. It does, but only in response to the sudden warming of El Niño (which, btw, shows you it’s water vapor, not CO2 that impacts temperature) and only to establish a new equilibrium, which can be clearly seen if one examines the relationship of El Niño to the temperature surges, the fall-off, and the new plateau that develops behind it.
You can clearly see when the strong El Niños went off: the rapid rise, then the fall to a higher equilibrium. It’s a step-up function. These started to become really impactful after the geothermal input started. There was a very strong El Niño in 1982-83, and then 1986-87, and yet no equilibrium increase.
But if we then look at the increase in SST after the input from geothermal, we get the answer to why the 1997-98 event did what the previous ones did not, and why each subsequent one has continued: There is more heat to put into the atmosphere. The fact that there were more El Niños before 1997-98 shows that the earth was not warming, as there was a warm response to the cooling, but overall, the planet did not warm. That can be plainly seen in the decadal temperatures from the 1950s to the decade ending in 1985 (the input started its rise after that).
The change there is much less than what has occurred since then.
This is why the global temperature metric, though mathematical, has some value in helping to explain what we are seeing. The nature of the warming, more away from the tropical Pacific than around it, means warmer temperatures and more low pressure over Indonesia and the Indian Ocean, and higher pressures in the mid-latitudes in the northern and southern hemispheres.
This creates a stronger easterly flow in the mean in the equatorial Pacific and hence the La Niña base state overall. El Niños, when they occur, have a greater heat source to tap, so they can go off, but you will see this collapse quickly in the spring, and next year at this time there should be a strengthening La Niña. And the lack of hurricanes this season will reverse. We are already thinking a major impact year is on the way next year.
All this is to explain that the drought-quenching rains with this El Niño, in the West, are a Band-Aid on a wound that cannot heal in this state. And it’s feeding back. You see that same distortion leads to less cloud cover in areas with the most incoming solar radiation, which in turn leads to a reduction in the Earth’s albedo (along with less ice), and that is a major natural warming signal. The man-made climate advocates want you to believe it’s CO2. Any point they have is dwarfed by the large natural forcing as described above. So, until the natural causes change, the West is in big trouble. For a while, I have been on record since April saying this El Niño is going to bust up the drought across the South and Southwest, it’s a one-year event, and they will be right back in the overall trend toward drier within a few months of the El Niño ending.
Knowing this, people in the West have to adapt rather than shake their fists at the sky or blame this or that. But overall, they have been just as negligent as people who should have had all hands on deck for the grid (if anything, the Biden administration was doing all it could to sabotage that). But what is going on in the West will get a Band-Aid. It has already started, as the anticipated Pacific-tropical connection, be it direct or indirect, is occurring. But this El Niño, with a negative PDO and such high-water temps off the Mexican coast, is going to be able to dump heavy to excessive amounts of precipitation across the South into the spring. I said the drought headlines will be replaced by flood headlines, and it’s already starting.
But the bottom line: This is a Band-Aid on the overall situation in the West, and adaptation policies need to be developed with all haste.
The history tells us that:
Tree-ring reconstructions (the North American Drought Atlas and related Colorado River / Sierra Nevada streamflow reconstructions) show repeated “megadroughts” — persistent dry spells of roughly 20–40 years or more — especially between about 800 and 1600 CE. Notable examples include:
- Two long dry intervals in California and the Sierra Nevada, roughly 862–1074 and 1122–1299, documented by trees that grew in lake beds and river channels that later refilled.
- A particularly severe mid-12th-century drought (roughly 1130s–1170s), including the driest decade in some Colorado River reconstructions around 1146–1155.
- Additional multi-decadal dry spells in the 13th century and a widespread late-16th-century megadrought (about 1559–1590s).
The difference, of course, is there weren’t about 85–90 million people, or roughly one-quarter of the U.S. population then.
You aren’t going to stop it. It’s already entering mega-drought status. And this El Niño may stop the bleeding, but again it’s a Band-Aid on a gashing wound. Adaptation is the answer, not draconian CO₂ policies that have no impact.
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