It is important to recognize that Extreme weather events are not a bad place to look for climate signals, as Roger Piekle has suggested. Instead extreme events are an important but not easy place to detect climate signals. So it makes complete scientific sense to look for the impact of climate change on extreme events, since they are a key cause of economic damage. Further it is not realistic for our changing climate to not impact most extreme events, even if that impact is small and hard to discern. It is crucial to examine the impact and this is the scientific process that now is ongoing.

“Complaining about what goes into a footnote vs. main text is hardly the stuff of in-or-out of scientific mainstream”

Given that the context of the discussion was the drought in California, leaving out the second part of the quote, which actually referred to the South West, (and contradicted your argument by the way), was pretty devious. Maybe not in-or-out of the scientific mainstream, but was it ethical? This is the sort of thing that Insurance companies do all the time, burying important caveats in the fine print.

Could it be that you did this because if you had included the entire quote in context, you couldn’t have realistically made your point in the first place?

Misleading is too kind a word for this sort of behaviour, dishonest is more apt. This is a type of argument, commonly employed by the contrarian or “skeptic” side, and is what has convinced me that they do not really have anything to contribute at all. If you have to rely upon quote mining, selective quotes out of context and cherry picking (which pretty much all they have as far as I can see), then maybe you don’t have an argument at all.

Norman Solomon. “Peace becomes perpetual when used as a rational for survival.” Yours truly. Socially enabled capitalism is a failed paradigm. War is a prime example. Stop profits from the exploitation and pollution of the commons. Give PEACE a chance. Give Green a chance. Hell, give HUMANITY A CHANCE!

Are you saying that the water shortage in California was created by politicians and environmental activists? How the heck did they do that?

It may not matter in the end. The effect of climate change is not necessarily drought in a given region (though it could be). It is extremes. We may see a california wondering what to do with all this extra water in a year or two.