No evidence of droughts getting Longer.

A  cross post from Really Sciency

 

According to Real Science “There is zero evidence that droughts are getting longer, more frequent, or worse.” Mr Goddard even offers proof in the post entitled; “You ArePaying Obama’s EPA To Lie To Your Kids”.

Typical of this pseudo-science blog it is often more political than even slightly scientific. The claim of Obama owning America’s Environmental Protection Agency, an organisation set up by Richard Nixon is pretty absurd. As President he does appoint who heads it as has every President since Nixon but no evidence is offered as to how such an organisation has to lie to the public in line with the administration's political will.

But what about the evidence of Lying to kids? This claim is based on the EPA’s, ‘A Student’s guide to Global Climate Change’ which Steve Goddard obviously disagrees with. 

 

He specifically claims the Guide in incorrect in one area where it claims ‘Since the 1970s, droughts have become longer andmore extreme worldwide, particularly in the tropics and subtropics.’ He asserts that “There is zero evidence that droughts are getting longer, more frequent, or worse.”

 

Disagreeing is one thing but providing evidence to support your position is another. However this is ‘Real Science’ so it gives the graph below apparently proving that droughts have not increased.

What you have here is cherry picked images of the US showing historical droughts from here; 

This proves nothing. Unless every year is graphed and analysed for the possibility of long term trends we cannot know if drought in the US has increased or not. 

Lets be generous. Mr. Goddard needs all the help he can get at times so let’s just assume he is correct. If when the data is analysed correctly it reveals exactly what he claims; “There is zero evidence that droughts are getting longer, more frequent, or worse.” How do things look now?......

Nope, things are no better, because even if he is right about drought in the US, the Guide is about Global Climate Change. And this is a recurring problem with Goddard on ‘Real Science’, particularly when it comes to hurricanes - only those that hit the US count; globally everything can be inferred by things happening in the US. No other part of the world matters when determining how climate change might affect the planet. Here are some typical examples;

Hurricane Activity In The US Has Declined Sharply Since The1950s

Hurricanes Becoming Much Less Frequent In Florida

US Hurricane Strikes In Sharp Decline

Even though these posts specifically mention the US and Florida they are used as evidence against Global Climate Change. At the time of writing this, though some of the above posts are quite old, not one of Goddard’s ‘Skeptics’ has mentioned that the US might not be the best representative for an entire planet. Imagine the furore if research was published supporting Global Warming but only looked at data from about 2% of the planets surface.

But in the Drought post he doesn’t even do us the curtsey to point out that he has only cherry pick some years from the US drought record to claim there is no evidence that droughts have become longer and more extreme worldwide.

But it gets worse – a lot worse.

 

The EPA just didn’t make up the claim about droughts becoming longer and more extreme worldwide, they reference a paper by Dai, A. 2010. Drought under global warming: A review.

Which in turn references 137 other sources to support it’s conclusions, that;

‘Global aridity has increased substantially since the 1970s due to recent drying over Africa, southern Europe, East and South Asia, and eastern Australia.’ 

This increased aridity is why globally droughts are becoming longer and more extreme.

But the paper also has some very specific things to say about droughts in the US, the US that Goddard uses as his ‘evidence’ against droughts increasing globally, it states;

“Regions like the United States have avoided prolonged droughts during the last 50 years due to natural climate variations”

Yes you read that right; Goddard dismisses claims based on a paper that specifically states the US hasn’t been following the global trend by highlighting the US trend as proof of the global trend. I really do wish I was making this up. Sadly Goddard’s ‘skeptic’ readership when confronted by this have so far choose to avoid being sceptical in any way.