Drought again...

Due to events in the Arctic this will be a short post, no need to click 'more', there isn't any more.

Stuart Staniford, on his "Early Warning" blog, has done a typically excellent post on Aiguo Dai's latest paper, the post is here. I've previously blogged on the issue of drought and Hansen's Climate Dice, here and here. Dai's paper is published around the same time as Hansen's Climate Dice new paper is also published, that's discussed here, the actual paper is available here. It's basically a re-run of the Climate Dice whitepaper Hansen released last November, this time peer reviewed and published.

Aiguo Dai's paper, "Increasing Drought under Global Warming in Observations and Models" is available here, that link brings up an html version of the paper for me - no paywall. It revisits earlier work and finds that the lack of drought signature in the US had been due to climatic variability, specifically the Pacific Interdecadal Oscillation, as that impact is now reducing and the warming is continuing, the match between models and observations this century has improved. But rather than me re-produce Stuart's post go read it.

Actually, it strikes me that Al Qaeda have been following the wrong path all along. Instead of suicide bombings, the way to destroy the USA would be to set up an Islamic theocracy somewhere where there's loads of oil, get the US addicted to it by selling it for less than it's really worth, and let the climate system do the hard work. Hang on...