… but not a drop to drink, But that’s okay. It’s hip to be dry! Everywhere you look in this great big wide world of ours you find a little (or not so little) drought going on.
In Georgia (the state of) and in much of the rest of the Southeastern United States:
ATLANTA (Reuters) – Georgia has declared a state of emergency over its worst drought in decades and appealed to President George W. Bush for federal aid.
Low rainfall in the Southeastern United States has caused a drought in several states, including swaths of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and North and South Carolina.
In California (where they’re having a really hot time of it):
(cont.)
Dry weather and hurricane-strength Santa Ana winds sent wildfires racing through much of southern California this weekend. Malibu, San Diego and areas around Los Angeles are all threatened by the fires that picked up early yesterday morning and spread quickly. More than 10,000 homes in the path of the blaze have been evacuated; one person has been killed and several others, including some firefighters, have been injured. […]
The fires are fueled by dry brush resulting from a record drought this year — the same drought that prompted the governor of Georgia to declare a state of emergency Saturday and ask President Bush for immediate federal assistance.
And in the Southwestern United States, in general (and Northern Mexico) which can expect a drought of biblical proportions:
Human-induced change in Earth’s atmosphere will leave the American Southwest in perpetual drought for the next 90 years, a new study finds.
Conditions in the southwestern states and portions of northern Mexico will be similar to those seen during a severe multiyear drought in the southwest during the 1950s and the drought that turned the Great Plains into the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.
And lets not forget the Land Down Under, shall we:
Australia’s blistering summer has only just begun but reservoir levels are dropping fast, crop forecasts have been slashed, and great swaths of the continent are entering what scientists yesterday called a “one in a thousand years drought”.
I would be remiss, by the way, if I failed to mention the water shortage our British Cousins in the United Kingdom recently experienced:
Under the new restrictions coming into force in the spring, a long list of water-related activities will be banned. They are understood to include using pressure hoses and filling ornamental ponds.
The dry weather of 2005 and 2006 led to empty reservoirs and hosepipe bans that affected more than 10 million people.
Or Nigeria’s troubles, for that matter:
Jigawa State stands to lose billions of naira due to the danger being posed by drought that is fast spreading throughout the state, leaving behind bare lands and dead farms.
Investigations conducted by Daily Trust revealed that the major reason for the rampaging drought is the short and erratic rainy season experienced this year.
Even the global economic powerhouse that is China has not been immune from drought conditions in the past few years:
BEIJING — A worst drought in 50 years is hitting western, central and northeastern Chinese regions, causing drink water shortages to at least 10 million people and an economic loss of 9.9 billion yuan (US$1.24 billion).
The worst-hit area is the southwestern municipality of Chongqing, which has had no rain for more than 70 consecutive days and where two-thirds of its rivers have dried up, local drought-relief authorities said on Thursday, adding that one person has died of serious heatstroke.
As for the Greater Mediterranean region and much of the Middle East, well, better get those desalinization plants up and running is all I can say:
This quote from Drew Shindell (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York) hit me very close to home: “Much of the Mediterranean area, North Africa and the Middle East rapidly are becoming drier. If the trend continues as expected, the consequences may be severe in only a couple of decades. These changes could pose significant water resource challenges to large segments of the population” (February, 2007-NASA, Science Daily). […]
The 10-hour flight from Chicago to Istanbul often inspires passengers to romanticize about Istanbul, both tourists and natives alike. Istanbul is the city of legends, forests, and the Bosphorus. It is an open museum of millennia of history with archeological and cultural remnants surrounded by green lush gardens. It is the place where east meets west; where blue meets green; where the great Mevlâna’s inviting words whisper in the wind “Come, come again, whoever you are, come!”
So you can imagine our collective horror as the plane started circling Istanbul and we saw a dry, desolate, dusty city without even a hint of green anywhere.
The Marmara region of Turkey where Istanbul is located received 34% less precipitation than average this past winter; and the Aegean Region, which includes the city of Izmir, received 43% less precipitation than average since October of 2006. Precipitation this low was unprecedented in these regions in the last three decades. […]
But not just for Turkey. Even popular vacation areas around the Aegean were hellish this year. Greece had to declare “state of emergency” at least twice this summer: once for forest fires killing over 60 people, burning half a million acres of land, and costing $1.6 billion; and once for drought on the Cyclades Islands due to water shortages.
Morocco experienced 50% less rainfall than average this year which will likely result in half of last year’s grain harvest. […]
Thus, the Mediterranean region is at high risk for desertification. Even if 2007 were an anomalously dry year, these disastrous events show us that small perturbations in weather patterns can lead to tragic and costly outcomes. They also show what is in store for this area in the next few decades as global warming progresses. And desert makes more desert. As land is overused and scorched by the hot sun and no rain, it dries up and vegetation cover diminishes due both to drought and wildfires. Lack of vegetation leads to further loss of humidity and increases erosion rates. So, deserts expand even more.
What a lovely sounding word, desertification, for something that in reality, is not so nice for the human and animal populations living in those regions which are undergoing it. As the New York Times notes, “we have seen the future and it is parched.”
Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”
A 2 in 3 chance (that’s 67% for you Republican readers) of a disaster in the “best case scenario” is not very heartening, now is it? Not exactly the sort of odds that I want my descendants or I to face, frankly. Indeed, it’s the sort of risk that makes the Pentagon begin to prepare for future wars over diminishing water resources. But don’t dare say drought could be caused by climate change connected to global warming. At least not if you are a member of the Bush administration, where whatever the consequences of global climate change, they are sure they will be manageable without direct governmental regulation.
As Bush sponsored a two-day global conference on climate change that ends today, his dispute with environmental critics can be boiled down to a single question: Should governments and businesses be encouraged to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse gases or forced to? […]
At a Rose Garden event on June 11, 2001, Bush said he would work with the United Nations and other allies to address global warming. He also said that “we do not know how much effect natural fluctuations in climate may have had on warming” and that “we do not know how fast change will occur or even how some of our actions could impact it.”
Well, the consequences of continuing the status quo may not be apparent to Mr. Bush and other global warming denialists, but to everyone else its very clear that humanity’s future is getting bleaker by the minute. To paraphrase a Bush quote made in a somewhat different context, by the time history proclaims that his climate change policies (or lack of same) were a catastrophic failure, “we’ll all be dead.” The question of just how many people that “we” encompasses now, and in the future, keeps expanding, however. My guess is that whoever is left to write the history of this era in 100 years will look upon Bush’s Iraq misadventures as the least of his mistakes.
