The Blob that Ate California's Rainfall

                                                    The Blob That Ate California's Rainfall


A huge area of warm water in the northeast Pacific Ocean is having dramatic effects on the climate of California and the rest of the United States. In one of my very first blog posts early last winter I discussed NOAA data showing the presence of a huge area of anomalously warm water off the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington, and I linked the warm waters to the very warm conditions prevailing on the western coast of North America.

Now this region of warm water has a name---Nick Bond, the Climatologist for the state of Washington decided to call the patch of warm water the "Blob." The Blob covers a huge area---its about 1,000 miles across and 300 feet deep and as much as 1 to 4 degrees Celsius (2 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer then normal. The warm waters of the Blob are clearly contributing to the warm and dry conditions seen in California, Oregon and Washington over the last couple of years and may once again help produce another usually warm and dry summer.  It is clear the Blob is at least partly responsible for the extreme drought conditions in California that are threatening the agriculture business in California and causing dramatic restrictions in the amount of water available for business activities and home use by California's 30 million residents.

Nothing like the warm ocean conditions of the Blob has ever been seen in this region before.  Is the Blob being caused by global warming? Nick Bond doesn't think so, saying

"This is a taste of what the ocean will be like in future decades. It wasn't caused by global warming, but it's producing conditions that we think are going to be more common with global warming."

Personally I find Bond's statement at best a little bit confusing and at worst completely wrong. How can Bond maintain the Blob has nothing to do with global warming when the Earth is now reaching record warm temperatures due to global warming and the Blob is producing exactly the conditions that are predicted to be caused by global warming? How can anomalously warm conditions in the ocean be unrelated to the anomalous warming of the oceans caused by global warming? Isn't a more likely hypothesis that the Blob, which is behaving just like a manifestation of global warming, actually is a manifestation of global warming?

Fortunately, scientists have a generally accepted way to evaluate these kinds of conflicting hypotheses. Occam's razor (Latin lex parsimoniae or 'law of parsimony'), is a problem-solving principle put forth by William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347). The principle states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Modern scientists use Occam's razor as a heuristic tool to evaluate different hypotheses.  For any physical process one could conjure up an infinite variety of complex but ultimately unlikely ways to explain what is observed in nature. According to Occam's Razor as applied to the scientific method simpler scientific theories are more testable and therefore are always preferable.

Lets examine how Occam's Razor applies to the question of whether of not the Blob has formed due to global warming. Dr. Bond believes that some unknown, unnamed, previously undescribed and no doubt complex set of events and processes is somehow creating the Blob and causing it to act in such a way that it mimics the effects of global warming.   Dr. Bond does not offer a logical explanation for the origins of the Blog, but simply asserts it is not due to global warming.  With all due respect, I hereby challenge Dr. Bond to actually describe the mysterious and unknown processes that he believes are creating the Blob and so effectively mimicing the effects of global warming without invoking global warming.  

In contrast, I suggest that the Blob, which in all regards is what one would expect from global warming, actually is a product of global warming.   My model for the cause of the Blob and the effects of the Blob is extremely simple and direct---the cause of the warming is global warming, and the observed effects are exactly what is to be expected from global warming.

I suspect William of Ockham would endorse my hypothesis linking the the warm waters of the Blob to a manifestation of global warming over Dr. Bonds' more complex hypothesis linking the Blob to dark and mysterious but still unknown forces about which nothing is known except Dr. Bond's contention that they are only mimicking the effects of global warming.