Last year Ottowa Mike was calling for all climate research to be defunded and moved to build nuclear plants. Now he is pointing out an important study that aids in understand what how water supply and agriculture will be affected by future precipitation changes. This guy has no real beliefs, he just wants to argue with everyone.
Fubao Sun et al, in this paper, believe they have identified another way that human activity is affecting climate: aerosol pollution. It will be awhile before we fully understand how aerosols are interacting with the known effects of warm dry air causing less rain. On logical next step is to control for aerosols in the analysis better then Sun el al's ANOVA process does. A logical hypothesis is that dry areas with relatively low aerosol pollution -- such as America's Southwest and Midwest -- are getting dryer as predicted by the earlier climate models. Testing this hypothesis will help model developers to better model the effects of aerosol pollution on climate.
Yes it will be wetter
Of course the theoretical models win, I mean you can't get funding for results can you.
Never mind science, Common sense tells me a warming world means a wetter world and that in general everywhere will get wetter.
You should google "SPURS NASA" or "STRASSE THALASSA" to see the result from two very recent oceanographic field experiments in the Atlantic (I think you can find presentations online from the SPURS data workshop held last month at a JPL website). The two experiments were looking at salinity in the upper ocean. They measured the highest salinity ever recorded for the open ocean (SPURS was a month after STRASSE, STRASSE measured the record and then SPURS bested that by like 0.01 psu). This suggests that the central N. Atlantic gyre (i.e., a dry place) has gotten drier (increase of salinity is a loss of water, or "drier" ocean). This result is consistent with the conclusions of the first article you linked to. Of course, the oceans cover 75% of the planet surface and they are following the thermodynamic prediction while the land, which covers 25% is not (and the land isn't following that trend because of anthropogenic aerosol influence as JeffM pointed out to you). So most of the planet that isn't heavily affected by human influences is working as predicted. I guess to a climate skeptic that means nobody understands anything, but I will never understand how you all live in something so small anyway.
Wattsup wins every time with you, Mike, even if you have to dredge back a few months into his archive to lamely try to disguise your witless recycling of his anti-science garbage.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/29/gl...
Nature wins.
Put some ice in a glass.
Fill the glass to the top with water.
Let the ice melt.
Watch what happens to the water level in the glass.
Why not post the entire thing?
"Unexpectedly we found a reduction in global land P variance over space and time that was due to a redistribution, where, on average, the dry became wetter while wet became drier. Changes in the P variance were not related to variations in temperature. Instead, the largest changes in P variance were generally found in regions having the largest aerosol emissions. Our results combined with recent modelling studies lead us to speculate that aerosol loading has played a key role in changing the variability of P."
What you are alluding to is not what the paper claims.
<< So who wins?>>
The comprehensive science.
...and the dry get drier?
Yes seems to be the consensus view on changes to precipitation patterns in a warming world.
"Fundamental thermodynamics and climate models suggest that dry regions will become drier and wet regions will become wetter in response to warming." http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6080/455.abstract
There you go, it's fundamental. And this set of fundamental thermodynamics is build right into climate models. So far, so good. Now let's have a look at this:
"Here we analyse observations of monthly P (1940-2009) over the global land surface... Unexpectedly we found a reduction in global land P variance over space and time that was due to a redistribution, where, on average, the dry became wetter while wet became drier." http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/pip/2012GL053369.shtml
(Note: P=precipitation)
Here we have observations butting heads with fundamental thermodynamics and climate models. And I believe we can call 1940-2009 a period of warming. So who wins?
