California is recovering from a devastating series of powerful winter storms that tore through the state, killing at least 21 people, collapsing hillsides and damaging thousands of homes.
Many media figures and officials were quick to blame global warming as the culprit.
Uvas Creek floods a section of Miller Avenue in Gilroy, California, as the last series of atmospheric rivers hit the Bay Area on January 9, 2023.
(AP)
While assessing the damage earlier this month, Governor Newsom said California was “proof that the climate crisis is real and we need to take it seriously.”
And while touring California on Thursday, President Biden said that “if anyone doubts that the climate is changing, then they must have been asleep for the last two years.”
Some experts say the recent storms weren’t necessarily the result of global warming. The Los Angeles Times interviewed several climate researchers who suggested the recent storms had more to do with the state’s well-documented historical dry-to-flood cycles.
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Climatologist Alexander Gershunov of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography said climate models show that global warming will drive California storms in the future “but we haven’t made that connection to more recent storm systems.”
Meanwhile, California’s official climatologist, Mike Anderson, told The Times that “every single recent atmospheric river was within the historical size distribution of atmospheric rivers.”
A portion of West Cliff Drive fell into the Pacific Ocean after a series of powerful rain storms and strong winds battered the central California coast in Santa Cruz, California on Sunday, January 8.
(Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
“Further studies will be needed to determine how warming temperatures influenced the timing or sudden transition from dry to wet and soon back to dry,” he said.
Jayme Laber, chief hydrologist at the National Weather Service in Los Angeles, told The Times: “It wasn’t anything as big as what we’ve been through before.”
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On Thursday, President Biden toured damaged areas in California and was briefed on recovery efforts. He was joined by Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell, Governor Newsom and other state and local officials as he visited the storm-damaged Capitola Pier in Santa Cruz County, where he met with business owners. and affected residents.
More than 500 FEMA and other federal personnel have deployed to California to support emergency response operations.
A closed road is seen near the Golden Gate Bridge following storms in San Francisco, California, USA, on January 5, 2023, in this screenshot obtained from a social media video.
Biden has already approved a major disaster declaration for the state, freeing up additional federal resources for recovery efforts. Hours before the visit, he further raised the level of federal assistance available.
From December 26 to January 17, the entire state of California averaged 11.47 inches of rain and snow, according to the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center, with some reports of up to 15 feet of snow falling over the three-week period. in the higher elevations of the Sierra Nevada.
California gets much of its winter rain and snow from a weather phenomenon known as “atmospheric rivers”: long, narrow bands of water vapor that form over the ocean and flow across the sky.
California has been hit by nine atmospheric rivers since late December. The storms have subsided in recent days, although forecasters were forecasting light rain towards the end of this week followed by a dry spell.
“As the Governor and scientists have made clear, California’s climate has changed. Californians are used to experiencing swings between droughts and floods, but weather-triggered wildfires and the ongoing mega-drought are intensifying the impacts of these storms. “A spokesman for the governor said. Fox News Digital.
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“This recent wave of storms is a preview of the supercharged changes in climate that scientists expect in the coming years. California is committed to treating climate as the crisis that it is with the urgency it demands.”
Associated Press contributed to this report.
