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To: Sea Otter who wrote (10005)	2/22/2012 9:48:37 AM
From: Brumar89	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

Looking back over a century, there is a very small positive trend in TX rainfall. Texas is not drying up due to global warming. Periodic droughts are NORMAL and are tied to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. ncdc.noaa.gov Chatting With a NOAA Meteorologist About This Drought: What It Is and What It Ain't By Brantley Hargrove Fri., Sep. 16 2011 at 4:55 PM So, what's our problem? Mostly, it's La Nina, that little trollop. She's been messin' with Texas for a long time. And the relationship between her cool Pacific sea-surface temperatures and dry times here is pretty well established. For nearly 120 years, since we've kept any kind of reliable records, La Nina has visited us 20 times, 19 of those resulting in below normal precipitation, according to Dr. Robert Hoerling, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research meteorologist, who served as the lead author of the U.S. Climate Change Science Plan Synthesis and Assessment Report. In fact, of all southwest states, Texas is pretty unique because a relatively long-term forecast of below-average rainfall can be made with some certitude where she's concerned. Now, just looking at La Nina won't tell us how deep the drought will be, but her presence tells us something's coming -- or not. So far, our beef industry has been brought to its knees, and we've seen the driest 11 months since we started keeping records in the late 1800s. La Nina started developing during the late summer of 2010, hit us throughout the winter and lingered into this spring. As a result, westerly storms moving across the Tropical Pacific with the jet stream got deflected northward. But by late spring, we were declared La Nina-neutral. And still, no rain of any consequence fell throughout the summer. What gives? Just plain bad luck, Hoerling says. "If you look at the official forecast before the season from NOAA, there wasn't any strong indication of it being dry or wet," he says. "The summer rains are hard to forecast. You're basically left at the whim of a meandering tropical storm." Take Tropical Storm Lee. It could have been ours. Instead, it tracked to New Orleans, where there was at least some moisture, and broke their drought decisively. It only fanned fires here in Texas. Drought, it seems, begets more drought. Different mechanisms bring rain to Texas during the summer than in the fall or winter. Technically, we can't lay it all at the feet of The Little Girl. Now La Nina has returned, portending more drought into next spring. We're in the midst of a huge weather cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which can last, as its name suggests, decades. Its cool phase is apparently ongoing. The bad news is that makes La Nina a likelihood. So, does that mean we're in for a 50s-type drought that drags on for almost a decade? "We don't have the ability to be able to forecast ocean temperatures, which were key in determining that 1950s prolonged drought," he said. Besides, he added, much about that drought -- like this one -- was unpredictable. Exactly why it was so dry, even when La Nina was dormant, is largely unknowable, left to unhappy chance and the Butterfly Effect. Or, at least, that's what it looks like now. The good news, Hoerling says, is that this isn't global warming. "This is not the new normal in terms of drought. Texas knows drought. Texas has been toughened on the anvil of droughts that have come and gone. This is not a climate change drought. What we do anticipate from climate change is a situation where temperatures progressively increase." In other words, this hot damned summer is another story entirely. blogs.dallasobserver.com

To: Sea Otter who wrote (10005)	2/22/2012 11:27:10 AM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

If a city or state spends money to handle the effects of climate change - such as how will we get water, or energy - that is what they are suppose to do. No a city getting involved here is largely wasting its money on politics. It wasn't "spending to handle the effects of change", (or at least not just doing that). And even if it was somehow what the city is supposed to do, lets assume for the sake of argument that its all ok, even expected, the fact that a single city spent more than the biggest of the supposedly evil oil companies, that are supposedly distorting the image of the problem by spending so much money to convince others that there isn't a problem, shows the weakness of that hole line of argument from the global warming alarmists, and from those who want to control corporate speech. And San Francisco is just a small part of it Australian science writer Jo Nova estimates that since 1989 the U.S. government has spent $79 billion on global warming-friendly climate research. Nova notes that the "figure does not include money from other western governments, private industry, [or universities] and is not adjusted for inflation," and yet even this partial sum is 3,500 times the $23 million spent by Exxon in the same period. Global warming alarmists however continue to accuse skeptics of being duped by disinformation from well-funded carbon polluters, while they seem incapable of recognizing the far greater funding that supports their own efforts. americanthinker.com Beyond that Exxon-Mobil's money has (at least recently) been spent in the other direction (along the same lines of San Francisco's, or the federal government's spending) --- Exxon-Led Group Is Giving A Climate Grant to Stanford By ANDREW C. REVKIN Published: November 21, 2002 Four big international companies, including the oil giant Exxon Mobil, said yesterday that they would give Stanford University $225 million over 10 years for research on ways to meet growing energy needs without worsening global warming. Exxon-Led Group Is Giving A Climate Grant to Stanford BP Deal at UC Berkeley: Corporate Research, Profits and Global Warming On February 1, Robert Birgeneau, Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, announced an agreement between BP (formerly British Petroleum) and the University of California at Berkeley to establish an Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) on the Berkeley campus. Under the agreement BP will provide the university with $500 million over 10 years. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, this is “by far the largest alliance ever between industry and academia.” BP Deal at UC Berkeley Alarmists see Koch’s minuscule funding to skeptics as being evidence of corruption, while Exxon and BP’s huge contributions to alarmists are all good. real-science.com H/T to Brumar who posted the links at Subject 57143