Two drought-related things crossed my desk today. The first was the CLIMAS southwest outlook, documenting growing drought conditions where I live.

The second involves drought in Niger. Drought’s a complicated thing, and it’s worth remembering that climate is not the only driver. A society’s resiliency is key, and Niger clearly has just about no margin when rainfall declines. But it was humbling to remember that when a “drought” happens here in the southwestern United States, people don’t die.

This critique of RealClimate by James Annan resonated with me:

More recently, they have plucked a couple of fairly minor papers out of relative obscurity and thrust them into the limelight for no apparent purpose other than to tear into them …. The authors’ crimes? In each case, they included a throwaway phrase which appears to pose some sort of challenge to the “consensus” view. In both cases, the papers make some valid points, and I don’t find the RC rebuttals entirely convincing. But it’s not so much the science I’m objecting to, as the tactic itself, which I don’t think is really warranted. With RC’s dominant influence on the web comes a responsibility to treat people – and the issues – fairly. They risk looking more like a playground bully than an honest broker.

I had the same reaction that James did. In one of the two cases (Cohn and Lins), I’d just read the paper and found it interesting because of my own adventures in trying to understand the effect of persistence on drought.

Rasmus’s criticism looked as though his primary goal was to quickly knock the legs out from under a bit of work that might otherwise be of use to “the skeptics.” That’s different than trying to help readers untangle the very difficult problem of distinguishing persistence from genuine trends, which is a difficult and important problem in climate science.

It occurs to me that if I really believe that the regional-scale climate change question is relevant, I should offer up the Albuquerque temperature numbers. 2005, according to the GISS data (adjusted to try to remove an urban bias), is the seventh warmest in history. Seven of the ten warmest years here have come since 1995 1994:

The 10 warmest years in Albuquerque:

1. 1995
2. 1954
3. 2003
4. 1994
5. 2001
6. 1996
7. 2005
8. 1943
9. 1956
10. 2000

(It’s a fun game! Click on the map where you live to hunt for local warming!)

The various analyses of global surface temperature are up for 2005. Realclimate has a rundown. The map from the NASA GISS folks is instructive:

By the GISS measure, 2005 is the warmest year since reliable temperature measurements have been available. By the measurement of the World Meteorological Organization and Climatic Research Unit group in the UK, it’s the second warmest year gobally in history (MSWord document).

Roger Pielke Sr. has some comments questioning the numbers. Given that I don’t really understand his wind and warm bias argument, I’ll pass on that one. But he also questions the sparseness of data. I’d be curious about his comments on Duffy et al.’s conclusion that the sparseness is likely to cause an underestimate of the surface temperature warming, rather than an overestimate.

For those who would like to revisit the question of whether the numbers merely reflect warming in cities where the thermomenters are located, I’ll refer you to Hansen and Ruedy, wherein the urban corrections used in the GISS data are discussed.

As for the monthly debate over whether globally averaged surface temperature is of any relevance, I’ll refer y’all to the map I cribbed above. I’d agree that a single global number isn’t terribly meaningful except as a sort of abstract marker for we journalists to hang a headline on. But the regional variability is of some use to those of us ’round the world curious about what’s happening where we live. And I’ll remind y’all that the planet’s surface is, after all, where we live. You’ll note that Michael Crichton’s going to have to work hard hard to get his fictional characters to the few spots on the globe that were cooler this year than the 1951-1980 average. Looks like they’ll need a boat, which is actually not a problem, since it’s fiction. He can just conjure one up.

Steve McIntyre, fresh from AGU, has noticed Jonathan Overpeck talking about drought and sea level rise, inferring some newly minted marketing message:

It’s hard not to conclude that Overpeck was attuned to the market and giving them what they wanted. You want sea level – Overpeck had sea level. You want drought – Overpeck had that too. Bob Carter described the session as being like being at an evangelist’s meeting. It hardly seems coincidental that the hot-button issues should have featured so dramatically.

Note to Steve: I was on a panel with Overpeck in the spring of 2003. The main emphasis of his talk was drought and sea level. He’s been talking about drought and sea level for a long time. See, for example, 2000 Years of Drought Variability in the Central United States, with Connie Woodhouse:

The authors’ assessment of the full range of past natural drought variability, deduced from a comprehensive review of the paleoclimatic literature, suggests that droughts more severe than those of the 1930s and 1950s are likely to occur in the future, a likelihood that might be exacerbated by greenhouse warming in the next century.

That’s from 1998. Dr. Overpeck’s been consistent in emphasizing this point for a number of years.