Speaking of which:
Southwestern droughts soon will become a permanent feature of life here - not just an occasional disaster to weather, according to a new study.
The Southwestern droughts of the past several dozen years are totally different from those that will occur as the planet warms, scientists discovered in a study published today in the journal Science.
"The future changes, they are something we haven't seen before," said Jian Lu, co-author of the study and a researcher with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.
NCAR, if you haven't heard of them, is a leader in gorebal warbling hysteria.
Studying the origins of predicted droughts. That's a neat trick, even with 19 (count 'em!) computer models.
Lu and his colleagues found that historic droughts in the Southwest could all be linked to natural variation in sea-surface temperatures, often to La Niña conditions, where the tropical Pacific Ocean cools.
That spins weather patterns around the globe - usually drying out the Southwest.
Such ocean-driven droughts can last one season or several years, but they break when the sea-surface temperatures shift back toward normal or warm, said co-author Richard Seeger, a researcher at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y.
Seeger's research team used 19 computer models to study the origins of the droughts that have been predicted for the future Southwest in a warmer world.
Global warming causes a very different type of drought, by sending rainstorm and snowstorm tracks northward, and by evaporating more moisture from the ground.
There's little relief, then, from shifting ocean temperatures, Seeger said.
"The next century, it will be like a permanent 1930s or 1950s drought," he said.
How does he know? To quote the old hymn: the models tell him so.