Poster's note : the paper below is interesting for general reading on AGW. I also think it's particularly applicable to geoengineering governance, because of the shift in public attitudes in the US which accompanied the drought. From my limited and unscientific perspective on US public opinion, the drought was accompanied by a drop in denialism. This matters for geoengineering, because political attribution of extreme weather to AGW is different from scientific attribution. Accordingly, pressure to geoengineer may be largely unrelated to the science behind the immediate, purported cause of this change in attitudes. Likewise, hostility to geoengineering programmes may be entirely unconnected with the actual effects of these programmes.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00055.1 Causes and Predictability of the 2012 Great Plains Drought M. Hoerling 1, J. Eischeid 2, A. Kumar 3, R. Leung 4, A. Mariotti 5, K. Mo 3, S. Schubert 6, and R. Seager 7[...] Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society DOI: 10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00055.1 Abstract Central Great Plains precipitation deficits during May-August 2012 were the most severe since at least 1895, eclipsing the Dust Bowl summers of 1934 and 1936. Drought developed suddenly in May, following near-normal precipitation during winter and early spring. Its proximate causes were a reduction in atmospheric moisture transport into the Great Plains from the Gulf of Mexico. Processes that generally provide air mass lift and condensation were mostly absent, including a lack of frontal cyclones in late spring followed by suppressed deep convection in summer owing to large-scale subsidence and atmospheric stabilization.Seasonal forecasts did not predict the summer 2012 central Great Plains drought development, which therefore arrived without early warning. Climate simulations and empirical analysis suggest that ocean surface temperatures together with changes in greenhouse gases did not induce a substantial reduction in summertime precipitation over the central Great Plains during 2012. Yet, diagnosis of the retrospective climate simulations also reveals a regime shift toward warmer and drier summertime Great Plains conditions during the recent decade, most probably due to natural decadal variability. As a consequence, the probability for severe summer Great Plains drought may have increased in the last decade compared to the 1980s and 1990s, and the so-called tail-risk for severe drought may have been heightened in summer 2012. Such an extreme drought event was nonetheless still found to be a rare occurrence within the spread of 2012 climate model simulations. Implications of this study’s findings for U.S. seasonal drought forecasting are discussed. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
