This post is for the purpose of maintaining a list of my blog series on the science of drought and global warming.
It's probably fair to have a disclaimer here. These are mostly written to be somewhat accessible for the lay reader. However, it should be borne in mind that I am not a climate scientist, and in particular, I haven't completely figured out what's going on here. There seem to be some notable inconsistencies in the science, and this series is really the process of me trying to get to grips with the situation. So caveat lector, as always...
Anyway, in order that they were posted:
This was when I had just read a new paper by Aiguo Dai on the projections for the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) in the IPCC AR4 models: I was pretty freaked out by the paper. This post covers PDSI at a very basic level, and discusses the projections.
This post looked at the somewhat imperfect fit between AR4 climate models and actual PDSI drought data for recent history.
This post provided a short tutorial on principal component analysis, and illustrated the extraction of the global warming signal and the El-Nino signal from the drought data.
This post gives a little more detail about how the PDSI is computed, and some comparisons of other indicators of drought.
Quick background on the hydrological cycle now, and regional distribution of water stress, as context for future projections.
In the northeastern 13 states of the US, historical statistics show that pronounced droughts are getting less common, not more.
California has been getting drier in recent decades, overall, but also with increased volatility - periods of great wetness interspersed amid the droughts.
A new paper suggests that tropical forests in Columbia and Venezuela did not experience drought or die-off during a major episode of global warming 55 million years ago.
Briefly comparing where current crop yields are highest with where drought seems to be increasing.
An update with new and more extensive comparisons of PDSI and streamflow and satellite data and the latest global drought trend maps.
Documenting that the Pliocene seems to have been generally wetter than recent climates - in contrast to projections for the climate under global warming where it seems to be getting drier.
An explanation of the currently favored hypothesis of why the Pliocene climate was generally wetter than the modern climate and drawing the contrast to the twenty-first century.
Thanks god, peak oil will stop us from destroying climate, or maybe not... :-)
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