Why do GW alarmists tout record drought and flooding as results of GW?

Question

I mean, with record droughts, where is all the flooding going to come from. With the flooding, where will the droughts be? Plus, with all the melting ice caps and that extra water and such high temperatures, do they not think that water will still be here or will it miraculously go into outer space?

Very serious questions for a very serious fantasy.

Answer 1

Uh, because that's what was forecasted and that's what's now occurring:

"Current Major Flooding In U.S. A Sign Of Things To Come, NOAA Predicts (Mar. 23, 2008) — Major floods striking America's heartland in mid-March offer a preview of the spring seasonal outlook, according to NOAA's National Weather Service."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...

Increased heat increases evaporation rates, which dries out marginal areas (such as the advancing edges of the Sahara and Gobi deserts, Australia, the Southwestern U.S.).  

The additional evaporation puts more water vapor in the air, which leads to increased flooding where the water falls (currently experienced in the Mississippi drainage, China, etc).

It's not possible to nail any one weather event down to climate change, but when they're observed with increased severity and frequency we'll be able to look back at that record and say "we've arrived there".  So technically speaking, to be completely accurate people should be saying that current events they're talking about are "consistent with" the predictions of incrfeased drought adn flooding, not that they're necessarily "caused by" global warming (although they may well be, we simply can't accurately identify them as such as they occur).

You are familiar with the concepts of deserts and rainy areas, aren't you, and that they both currently occur simultaneously on the same planet?  We'll simply get more of those extremes.

Answer 2

The amount of precipitation is normal.  There are more people moving into areas that are prone to flood or drought and have done so many, many times over the millennium.

The only difference is that there are more people effected, and news travels faster then back then.

Answer 3

Could you be more specific?  Who are the touters?  Oh well.  I'm sure they'll show themselves.

My understanding of what the predictions about weather are is (1) increased precipitation in areas that typically have precipitation, due to increased evaporation, particularly at the equator (2) Intensification and expansion of drought areas due to heat, and the same natural barriers that made them drought areas originally.

Longer term, the surface area of the oceans will grow when the ice has all melted, contributing to evaporation even more.  Eventually if you follow it out you get the set of conditions thought to prevail in the very early earth, with temperatures too high for liquid water to exist, continuous rain, evaporating when or before it hits the ground.

Answer 4

increased melt water from the ganges;

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar...

higher and higher tides;

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20080330/ts...

oh, you want droughts? i would link to one of the many Australian pieces (drought And flood in the same place, what fun!) but maybe something closer to home might have more effect on you;

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory....

Answer 5

The real experts determined that what warming there was stopped 10 years ago.

British policy advisor says Gore is in 'panic' mode

Jim Brown - OneNewsNow - 4/1/2008 12:00:00 PM

Al Gore warming British environmental analyst Christopher Monckton says Al Gore's latest attack on global warming skeptics shows the former vice president and other climate alarmists are "panicking."



On Sunday, CBS News correspondent Leslie Stahl asked Al Gore on the television show 60 Minutes what he thinks of people like Vice President d**k Cheney who doubt that global warming is caused by human activity.



"I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view, they're almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona, and those who believe the earth is flat," replied Gore. "That demeans them a little bit, but it's not that far off."



However, Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy advisor for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, says the former vice president can enjoy his "flat earth fantasies" for a few months, but in the end, the world will be laughing at him.



"The alarmists are alarmed, the panic mongers are panicking, the scare mongers are scared; the Gores are gored. Why? Because global warming stopped ten years ago; it hasn't got warmer since 1998," he points out. "And in fact in the last seven years, there has been a downturn in global temperatures equivalent on average to about [or] very close to one degree Fahrenheit per decade. We're actually in a period ... of global cooling."



Monckton contends Gore is now "panicking" because he has staked his reputation as a former American VP on "telling the world that we're all doomed unless we shut down 90 percent of the Western economies." He also contends that Gore is the largest "global-warming profiteer."



Gore's group The Alliance for Climate Protection is currently launching a new $300 million ad campaign that demands reforms in environmental law to help reduce the supposed "climate crisis." But Monckton points out that in the U.K., Gore is not allowed to speak in public about his "green investment company" because to do so would violate racketeering laws by "peddling a false prospectus." He says that fact came about after a British high court found Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, riddled with errors.



Monckton challenged Gore to an internationally televised debate on climate change last year.

Answer 6

GW causes a decrease in precipitation (droughts) but causes an increase in sea level as ice caps melt (flooding).

Let me ask you this:  during hurricane Katrina, California was in a drought.  Why didn't they just get some water from the hurricane and use it in California?

Answer 7

Britain has just suffered the coldest March for 40 years.

Due to 'global warming' i imagine..........

Answer 8

Water distribution is reorganized due to climate change caused by global warming. It's that simple.

Answer 9

Don't you, and I mean you personally, continually point to droughts in the American SW as evidence of global warming 1000 years ago?  So if "alarmists" point to droughts now in the American SE as evidence of global warming in modern times, why is that incorrect but your use of droughts as an indicator in the SW correct?

Just curious.  Seems like you don't understand something, or have two sets of rules.

Answer 10

Now this has to be a bit of science for you, but what happens when temperature rises is that the amount of humidity in the air before we get cloud formation rises sharply. This means that when clouds form we have far more water vapour in the air so it feeds into a much larger storm, a storm that pulls in more water from much wider areas, and which will drop a lot more rain in a narrow band as it moves inland.

But as it does the above, it sets up strong connections to a jet stream. The jet stream in turn guides where the next storm is likely to follow. so we get one big storm following another, and dropping gully washing amounts of rain or snow along narrow bands that proceed to be flooded, while missing other areas even close by.

THe total amount of rainfall will be greater, but because it will be delayed until much larger volumes of water accumulate in the atmosphere, and then dump it, we get fewer smaller storms too. Smaller storms are more likely to distribute rain over more area mostly because they do not set up such strong jet streams in the upper atmosphere. But they also distribute the ran more in time.

This is the theory, but observation of weather patterns is much more convincing.

HIGHER TEMPERATURES most definitely increase the amount of water vapour required to trigger cloud formation, so we get a lot more cloudless sky around the globe if global temperatures are higher.

Below those cloudless skies, we actually have qa lot more of our most significant greenhouse gas, water vapour, so that we get even more heat trapped by the resulting greenhouse effect.

Answer 11

Global warming causes precipitation to change.  Higher temperatures cause evaporation to happen faster, clouds to form more quickly and release their precipitation more quickly.  This concentrates more rain in fewer areas, which means some places will see floods while others see droughts.