Midwest To Become Arid, As It Gets Wetter!
By Paul Homewood
From “Where do they get this crap Department”?
A new study, based on (you guessed it, climate models), reckons that the arid belt in the western US is moving east, threatening the corn belt in the Midwest:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-04/teia-t1m041118.php
This is the study:
Abstract
The 100th meridian bisects the Great Plains of the United States and effectively divides the continent into more arid western and less arid eastern halves and is well expressed in terms of vegetation, land hydrology, crops, and the farm economy. Here, it is considered how this arid–humid divide will change in intensity and location during the current century under rising greenhouse gases. It is first shown that state-of-the-art climate models from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project generally underestimate the degree of aridity of the United States and simulate an arid–humid divide that is too diffuse. These biases are traced to excessive precipitation and evapotranspiration and inadequate blocking of eastward moisture flux by the Pacific coastal ranges and Rockies. Bias-corrected future projections are developed that modify observationally based measures of aridity by the model-projected fractional changes in aridity. Aridity increases across the United States, and the aridity gradient weakens. The main contributor to the changes is rising potential evapotranspiration, while changes in precipitation working alone increase aridity across the southern and decrease across the northern United States. The “effective 100th meridian” moves to the east as the century progresses. In the current farm economy, farm size and percent of county under rangelands increase and percent of cropland under corn decreases as aridity increases. Statistical relations between these quantities and the bias-corrected aridity projections suggest that, all else being equal (which it will not be), adjustment to changing environmental conditions would cause farm size and rangeland area to increase across the plains and percent of cropland under corn to decrease in the northern plains as the century advances.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/EI-D-17-0012.1
Does it ever occur to these fraudsters that we can check the actual data?
All the way up that 100th Meridian, the climate has grown wetter since the early 20thC. totally the opposite of what is claimed should be happening under a warmer climate.
How can such obviously fake science get through peer review?
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
It gets through peer review because they select reviewers who agree with and are part of the climate change agenda.
I was told many years ago by a scientist that peers do not knock down peers as it would destroy the system – its sort of like a mutual admiration society
Peer review is never what many people would expect – a thorough test of all the claims made, methods used, data etc. – assuming it isn’t where the warmist crowd have hidden the data and refused to publish it as the scientific method requires. It is no more than a read through. And then there is ‘pal review’ which is very common in climate science fiction.
Having had family living in the American mid-West since the mid-1800s, the weather varies. I’m not sure the climate has actually changed at all.
From the abstract:
“…all else being equal (which it will not be)…”
“…which it will not be…”
Clue to stop reading.
“How can such obviously fake science get through peer review?” The peers are frauds, too.
I would like Wyoming to dry out. I liked the “high plains desert” idea. The past two or three years have been much more humid and wet than in the 90’s.
The last paper I ever had published in a peer-reviewed international journal was some 18 years ago. At the time I was wryly amused when the editor asked me to name two referees. I had little problem having the paper accepted.
My other memorable experience with a referee was some ten years earlier. We happened to mention in passing that the 20 m.y.-old Miocene deposit we were describing contained fossilized wood. One referee – from a major government scientific establishment – recommended non-publication for not having had the tree material carbon–dated.
I imagine there was a certain amount of bemusement at that suggestion.
The limit for carbon dating being only 23.55 million years too short. Perhaps the janitor made the “peer review”.
Spot on.
It was one of that band of fraudsters at UEA who said “we will redefine peer review”.
No I think it’s right, it’s bound to get hotter and more arid under AGW, except when it’s colder and wetter. That AGW for you, whatever you predict, whatever happens, it’s all AGW.
Makes sense to me.
It’s ‘science’ mate. Stop fighting it Paul. Nothing is real, except what happens, and that will be AGW.
Does that also assume that all the current snow will melt away?
Isnt the divide based partly on a slightly but continuously rising altitude from the Mississippi river valley ?
Des Moines Iowa is at about 800ft Grand Island in central Nebraska is 1800ft, Denver is famously the ‘mile high city’
While the St Louis area is 500-600ft altitude.
“How can such obviously fake science get through peer review?” The Editors get to pick the “appropriate” referees…those who fit the editors’ views?
Because peer review is pal review Paul
I’ll know it’s a problem when we can no longer divert 40% of the corn crop to transportation fuels.
The Encyclopedia Brittannica has a good article on the Great Plains:
“In the 1880s and ’90s farmers began to crowd the ranchers, and wheat began to replace cattle. Settlement came in years of good rains, so the Great Plains were overpopulated in the first rush. A heavy emigration followed the twin blows of drought and economic depression in the 1930s. Many grain farmers left because their farms were too small and more vulnerable to drought than the cattle ranches. ”
Good rains to no rain/drought
https://www.britannica.com/place/Great-Plains
Imagine what the alarmists would be saying if we had another dust bowl like in the 1930’s? The weather extremes in that decade were astounding. Not just hot summers but very cold winters to. Now consider that the only place the average person might find air conditioning back then was in their local theater. Afternoon Matinees were very popular back then.
Oh BTW on Tuesday I ran through snow flurries pretty much the whole way across Ohio on I-70 and until I got through the last tunnel about 30 miles west of Carlisle on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The only place the snow was sticking was at the highest elevations along the Turnpike. Today driving US 322 West in PA I noticed there was still ice on the northern exposures of some cuts and patches of snow in shaded places near State College.
Joe Bastardi in his update for Tuesday showed that only four years since the turn of the century have January through April have been warmer than the average in the contiguous 48 states. All the rest of the years in this century those first four months have been colder than average.
Check your definition of average.
I live in Morgantown, WV. On Tuesday, we had periods of snow-squalls all day. This afternoon I am going to a conference in Canaan Valley in Tucker County. We are not supposed to have more than flurries there. Canaan Valley and Dolly Sods above on the Allegheny Front are places where there are relict communities of northern plants which found refuge following the glacial back and forth.
My late mother said the first snowplow she ever saw was on The Mileground in Morgantown when she and my daddy were returning from a movie in Uniontown, PA on April 30, 1929. They were married on June 8, just after she graduated from WVU earlier that week.
Oh please! No!
We take a model that is wrong in modeling the present, adjust it to model the present more accurately and then assume the rest of it is just fine?
If your model is wrong now, it is wrong in the future, except for the not-zero chance that it gets it right purely by chance.
Models that are wrong are wrong. And then all they are modeling are their assumptions anyway.
The Earth Institute at Columbia is a hot-bed of AGW. Economist and head of the Institute is Jeffrey Sachs, adviser to the UN and the Pope:
After GISS, James Hansen is on the staff there:
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/eidirectory/view/342
One word answer Paul. Groupthink.
Quite staggering mendacity ! The only problem with “groupthink” is that there is no evidence of the “think” bit !!
The area of The Great Plains actually occupies a vast basin. Part is the Mississippi Embayment which was a former sea arm. The Basin, a result of tectonic action, has filled with sediments which is why the soil is so good for grass. It is not ubiquitous, however, The drier, western part towards the Rocky Mountain,s is short-grass prairie, then the mid-grass prairie and finally the eastern and wetter part is the tall-grass prairie. The tall-grass region is in the northern part and skirts the western Great Lakes.
The greatest factor in moisture of the Great Plains is the Rocky Mountains. Storms tracking from west to east over them have the moisture skimmed as they cross over the tall peaks. Thus, east of the mountains is the “rain shadow”.
In West Virginia, the eastern portion of the state is occupied by the Allegheny Front of the Appalachian Mountains. It is the eastern divide, with waters to the west draining down the Ohio River, into the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. On the east side they drain into the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. When you drop off the Allegheny Front to the east, you are in the rain shadow where rainfall is half what it is a few miles to the west: 20 inches vs. 40+ inches. To the west, are the relict communities of plants which survived in these higher, cooler, moister pockets and bogs following the glaciation when vegetation moved back and forth. To the east are the “shale barrens” which are warmer, drier and contain a number of endemic species of plants.
O/T … a tip of sorts
Subsidy junkiedom made flesh
And no, they don’t think anyone will check the facts. Facts are an abstract concept in climate science fiction.
American midwest, has been hot, cold, dry, wet and very hot, very dry, very cold, very wet, whodathunkedit?
The climate it’s dynamic thus it changes and mankind tells lies about climate, seemingly that doesn’t change.
Reblogged this on UPPER SONACHAN WIND FARM.