The acid test of a scientific theory is whether it makes predictions that eventually come true. So consider this old prediction, from a pair of researchers in Australia and New Zealand. …
“The available evidence suggests that a warmer world is likely to experience an increase in the frequency of heavy precipitation events, associated with a more intense hydrological cycle and the increased water-holding capacity of a warmer atmosphere.”
That was published in 1995, and it was based on research going back to the 1980s. Fast forward to 2014. …
The future, it would seem, has arrived. …
In the United States, the increase in water vapor has been on the order of 3 percent or 4 percent since the 1970s… That may not sound like a big jump, but the effect is enormous.
… the warming has, on average, put more than a trillion gallons of extra water into the air over the contiguous 48 states, probably closer to two trillion. That extra water has to fall as rain or snow. But from the elementary physics, it was long unclear whether this would mean more rainy days over all, or more intense rains, or both.
It was the computer models of the climate that suggested, starting in the late 1980s, that the answer would be the latter, and so it has turned out.
No doubt there will be some scepticism in California where the drought continues to get worse. What’s not immediately apparent, however, is that California’s rain is still falling, it’s just not falling in California.