The science and policy of climate variability and climate change: Intersections and possibilities

Drought policies have generally been attempts to manage, adapt to, and ameliorate the impacts of climate variability with the assumption that this is variability around long-term averages in rainfall, temperatures, and crop and water yields. As noted in Chapter 1, this results in either or both reactive policies to address the effects of particular droughts and anticipatory policies to encourage resources managers to prepare for dry periods. With the emergence of concerns about climate change, discussions of drought policy will increasingly have to consider both variability and the possibility of underlying long-term changes in the key climatic variables-that is, nonstationarity. This chapter will first review the points where the sciences relating to climate change and climate variability are intersecting. Second, the policy implications of adjusting to increased variability and, in some cases, increasing drought frequency are considered. Third, there is a discussion of the ways in which popular narratives about drought and climate change interact, with a particular focus on the ways that resource users interpret the two phenomena and in some cases use one (drought) to refute the other (climate change).