The Good, the Bad, and the Debatable

One Scientist Forecasts an El Niño Respite from the Southwest’s Drought—For Now

By Ken Wright, 4-20-06

The vision of a respite from the Southwest’s drought came from an unlikely source lately. Outspoken global warming alarmist James Hansen, head of the NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York City, is projecting that warming water in the Pacific Ocean will yield a wet winter in the Southwest," according to the Associated Press.

In fact, Hanson is calling it “a super El Niño.” He argues that warming off the coast of Peru and other conditions are like those leading up to the strong El Niño winter of 1997-98. El Niño drags the jet stream south, and so storms enter the U.S. through California and over the Four Corners. La Niña, on the other hand – which we’ve been experiencing for the last six years – is a weather pattern that pushes the storm track toward Canada, and the Southwest is left high and dry.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that Hansen also argues that even this wet winter (if it happens) is part of the evidence supporting those dire longer-term forecasts. He says that global warming increases the chance of an occasional extreme El Niño. In fact, according the Hansen, 2005 produced the highest world-wide average temperature in more than 100 years of record keeping.

This is an argument that Hansen has been making a lot lately, as he has been for years. He has spoken before Congress, and has also been visibly outspoken in his contention that the Bush Administration stifles information and debate about global warming. Hansen’s latest dust-up came last week, when The New York Times reported that NASA has been trying to limit Hansen’s writing, speaking, and contact with journalists.

Try to stifle him, but he has allies in other projections. Recently the Colorado College State of the Rockies report projected a more than 80 percent loss in springtime snowpack in the San Juans Mountains, here in southwestern Colorado. And according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the long-range forecast is for continued hard-core drought in the Southwest all the way up to the Four Corners area.

So, despite some recent precipitation and Hansen’s forecast, the Southwest still sits firmly in the grasp of this extended drought. Or something …. According to the University of Northern Arizona’s “Forest Fire in the Southwest “ project, there is a spectrum of argument debating the implications of this drying out, from it’s the worst drought in nearly a millennium and a half, to the region is actually merely swinging back from a couple of anomalously wet decades.

And the projecting goes on.

By the way: According to the Federal Climate Prediction Center … among 20 computer models, none predicts as strong an El Niño as Hanson forecasts.

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