North Carolina needs 22-30 inches of rain in the next six months to recover from current drought conditions. That’s the assessment of state climatologist Ryan Boyles.
That total would constitute 2-5 inches more rain than the state would expect for the upcoming six-month period, Boyles said. He told a legislative study committee today that the scenario of higher-than-expected rainfall in the short term is unlikely.
That’s the bad news. The good news, for those who fear global warming alarmists are trying to use drought conditions to bolster their case, is that Boyles also passed along some information that flies in the face of some of the alarmists’ more outlandish claims.
First, current drought conditions are bad, but North Carolina saw similar conditions in 1925, long before “evil” 21st century people started doing the things that alarmists want us to stop doing. Second, the drought is tied to a La Nina pattern that seems to involve some cooling in the Pacific. (I’m paraphrasing, so I apologize for any error in reporting the science correctly.) If the Pacific were warming, Boyles explained during an answer to a legislator’s question, we would more likely see at this time an El Nino weather pattern that would give us quite a bit of rain.
Third, there’s an awful lot of scientific uncertainty. Summer is less than six months away, but Boyles told lawmakers he has no confidence in projecting how much rainfall the state will see in the summer months. He says there’s so much variability in summer rainfall patterns that he can’t make any predictions. (He wasn’t confident that he’d be more likely to make a good prediction in 10 years.)
That last point concerns only local weather data, but it reminds us that any weather projections involve a great deal of guesswork. Tying policy to long-term weather and temperature predictions might not always be in our best interests.
