California will burn until it rains — and climate change may keep future rains away

Climate change denier Rupert Murdoch’s home is a smoldering ruin. Murdoch, as you know, has described climate change as “alarmist nonsense”. You still feel we can’t ring the alarm yet Rupert?

 There hasn’t been a whole lot of coverage on this major story of wildfires burning out of control in southern California on this site. But we live in the time of utter chaos, where even news about a looming nuclear holocaust is not the headline. What a fucked up mess this country has got itself into. Can we even survive these clowns? I have my doubts, a fresh new hell every single day is our reality now.

The phenomenon of a warming planet fueling disasters worldwide will not go away, ever. If the climate continues to be ignored as a side issue in this country, than we are doomed to be caught with our shorts down. 

Rachel Becker of The Verge reports on the grim news out of the west coast. I recommend reading the full article.

California gets most of its rain between October and May from storms that roll in from the Pacific, riding a highway of strong winds in the upper atmosphere called the jet stream. By now, LA should have been sprinkled by about two inches of rain, National Weather Service meteorologist John Dumas told the LA Times. But so far it’s only seen about 5 percent of that, amounting to about one-tenth of an inch. Burbank, California, has seen even less, says National Weather Service meteorologist David Sweet. Despite the rain that’s been showering Northern California, the bottom part of the state is abnormally dry; certain areas are even experiencing a moderate drought. “We’re quite parched,” Sweet says.

Update: another day, another unbelievably dry forecast for the West Coast. This is a 16-day precipitation accumulation map from GFS model, which suggests that the next 16+ days could be *completely dry* across all of California, Oregon, and Washington!#CAwx#ORwx#WAwx#BCwxpic.twitter.com/pO169CuHl2

Storms in the jet stream can get diverted by high-pressure bubbles of warm air. A version of this phenomenon called an "atmospheric ridge" is to blame for Southern California's current dry spell. And even even bigger one has started forming along the entire West Coast of the US that could shunt rainfall into Canada or Alaska, Swain writes. “We were dry before and now the prospects for rain look even less likely because of the size of this thing,” Sweet says.

This is the same atmospheric phenomenon that squatted over the state for three winters in a row during California’s record-setting, five-year drought. “The real question is how long it persists,” Swains says. During the drought, these ridges lasted for months at a time — but we don’t know what’s in store for this new one. Even worse news: these atmospheric ridges are getting more common — possibly thanks to human-caused global warming, Swain and his colleagues reported in a 2016 study.

And they could become even more frequent in the future as the polar ice melts, new research says. Scientists led by Ivana Cvijanovic at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory modeled how dwindling Arctic sea ice could affect the global climate over the coming decades. They found that as the sea ice melts, the Arctic warms — starting a chain reaction that ultimately helps these atmospheric ridges form over the North Pacific, blocking rain from falling on California. That doesn’t just make drought more common, it’s also possible that it could also make fire seasons last longer.

The findings, described in a new study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, are a hint of what’s to come — but they’re not a prediction of the future, Cvijanovic cautions. Other shifts in air pollution, greenhouse gasses, and even volcanic activity over the coming decades could also change how much rain falls on California. (In fact, another recent study suggests climate change could make California wetter.)