The record warmth of March in the US as well as the warmth of April was more than just a set of numbers or a temporarily interesting headline. Along with the heat, precipitation for most of the southern half of the country has been below average in the past few months. The result? At least some level of drought conditions exists today:
The Pacific Northwest had below average temperatures and above average precipitation during the same time period, thus the relative lack of drought in OR, WA, ID, MT & WY.
Drought has been present across GA for the better part of a year now. The area affected by drought has expanded to neighboring states during the end of the winter and beginning of spring.
The area experiencing exceptional drought has fallen slightly in the West since April while the area has expanded slightly in the Southwest. I will note that more than 50% of the Northeast is also currently experiencing some level of drought conditions.
There’s no crisis to speak of yet, but inhabitants as well as policymakers should monitor conditions as the year progresses. These conditions are not a result of climate change in any direct way. They are simply a result of a chain of events, some of which (e.g. Arctic ice loss in recent years) are more directly related to climate change than others.
The record warmth of March in the US was more than just a set of numbers or a temporarily interesting headline. Along with the heat, precipitation for most of the southern half of the country has been below average in the past few months. The result? At least some level of drought conditions exists today:
The Pacific Northwest had below average temperatures and above average precipitation during the same time period, thus the relative lack of drought in OR, WA, ID, MT & WY.
Drought has been present across GA for the better part of a year now. The area affected by drought has expanded to neighboring states during the end of the winter and beginning of spring.
There’s no crisis to speak of yet, but inhabitants as well as policymakers should monitor conditions as the year progresses. These conditions are not a result of climate change in any direct way. They are simply a result of a chain of events, some of which (e.g. Arctic ice loss in recent years) are more directly related to climate change.
And if you’ve paid any attention to this topic in the past couple of years, it’s not difficult to guess which states those are. If your state tends to vote Republican in general elections, your state is among those that have planned the least for climate change. Unfortunately, those states are also characterized by large human populations, agriculture, or both.
Take Texas, for instance, a state that demonstrates how little actual human affairs matter in a governance regime. Texas experienced the worst drought in its recorded history last year. It got so bad, many towns had water shipped in by truck because they previously drained their aquifers. In the pursuit of runaway capitalism and to stick it to the black President, Texas is among the states which has done the least to plan or prepare for additional climate change impacts in the 21st century. Perhaps they think if the secede from the US or rough up states that adjoin the Great Lakes, they can take care of their current and future water problems.
So what are the rest of us supposed to do? As red states continue to scream at reality regarding anthropogenic climate change, they’re running dry. Once cities start running out of fresh water, how should the rest of the country respond? With benevolence and assistance? For what purpose – red states already siphon more resources from blue states – blue states are supposed to be alright with additional resource greed? Once the agricultural center of the country collapses due to intense decadal droughts, what are other regions supposed to do? There won’t be viable acreage to replace the land that was mismanaged for decades. The rest of the country will literally suffer from food scarcity because of the intensity of red staters’ belief system. There won’t be any mea culpas from red staters as the “liberal elite” bail them out from the manifestations of their rigid ideology. No, red staters will simply demand that it’s the responsibility of those elitists to fix problems that were forced on everybody.
Put another way – how much of your fresh water will you be forced to give up in 30 years because so-called conservatives were overly skeptical regarding viable climate science?
While Colorado’s weather this summer shifted from warm to wet to hot, it was plain and simply nothing but hot, hot, and hot in the states to our south. How hot was it?
It was so hot that Texas and Oklahoma set the U.S. record for the 1st and 2nd hottest summers: 86.8F and 86.5F, respectively, beating out Oklahoma’s 1934 record (set during the Dust Bowl years) of 85.2F. To be clear, from June through August, the average of all the temperatures taken at the top of every hour came out to above 86 degrees. Oh, Louisiana’s 2011 summer now ranks 4th warmest all-time at 84.5F.
When records from the previous hottest period in the nation’s history are falling, it’s time to pay attention. Instead of natural variability playing the primary role, the heat wave this year was by the altered background state.
Statistically speaking, it is more significant that Texas set the record instead of Oklahoma. The number of weather stations in Texas is obviously much higher than those in Oklahoma. Most, if not all of those stations were subjected to similar conditions for 3 months in order to set this kind of record – a truly amazing occurrence.
I’m going to riff off of Joe Romm’s recent post on a similar topic and re-post some graphics I’ve written about before. They are particularly salient now that the summer of 2011 is fresh in our memories.
This is a plot from a NOAA-led report that shows what the future holds under a business-as-usual emissions scheme. Focusing in on Denver, which just experienced its hottest August and 3rd hottest month ever with 22 days above 90F maximum temperatures, puts this plot into some context. Denver didn’t record a single 100F degree day this year. But if we continue along the path we’re on much longer, we’re likely to experience 7 to 9 weeks of 100F or hotter days. Moving on down to Texas and Oklahoma, things really get cooking. Between 13 and 23 weeks of 100F or hotter days are in their future. How much agriculture do you think can be successfully supported in those conditions? How much ranching can be done? How many water pipes will break in the ground as that ground swells in the heat?
And it’s not just heat, as this plot from a recent NCAR study demonstrates. Palmer Drought Severity Index values in the 1930s spiked very briefly to -6 (see scale above), but rarely exceeded -3 during the rest of the decade. By the 2030 decade, projections of -4 to -6 PDSI values cover most of the American Southwest. Texas gets off “easy” with PDSI values holding near -2 for the decade. Significantly higher temperatures in twenty years’ time accompanied by drought conditions worse than those of the Dust Bowl could easily be the future that comes to pass.
Given the scope of the tasks facing us: reduction of emission levels that are currently growing and deployment of infrastructure and technologies to do so, I’m not optimistic that we can turn things around in time in order to avoid these kinds of scenarios. Given the severity of the scenarios, we had better start doing something substantial soon.
Even though most areas along the Front Range of Colorado have seen over 1″ of precipitation in the last couple of weeks, drought conditions continue to affect the region.
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor (NOAA’s NCDC), those conditions start along the east side of the Continental Divide and grow steadily worse as you look east and south. 22 counties are completely covered by `Severe` drought conditions. Additional counties have at least some area in the Severe category. Unfortunately, Baca County in southeastern Colorado has slid into the `Extreme` drought category. One of my close friends has a place down there – I know the communities in Baca are growing increasingly worried about these conditions.
Some good news might be on the horizon. The moderate La Nina that has been present is finally starting to weaken: neutral El Nino conditions (+/- 0.5C temperature anomalies) are expected to prevail across the tropical Pacific later this year.
Combined with the North Atlantic Oscillation retreating from its extreme negative phase earlier this winter to more neutral conditions, the polar and subtropical jet streams should be returning to more “normal” placements and strengths. This could hopefully mean that normal storm tracks will again appear over Colorado this summer. If the monsoon shows up this year, that would be great too.
I’m pleased as punch that many mountain sites have near-record snowpack this year. The plains sure could use some moisture moving into 2011. Nobody wants to see the conditions in Texas affect other places.
Global warming is causing dramatic enough shifts in temperature and precipitation such that downstream effects are starting to show up across the globe. I picked up the following from an economics blog, but wanted to focus on the likely underlying causality to make a point about the future (source):
Dry conditions extending to Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado may cut crop yields in the U.S., the world’s largest exporter, as too much moisture threatens fields in North Dakota and in Canada. Wheat futures in Chicago are up 50 percent in the past year, after drought in Russia and floods in Australia hurt output and sent global food prices surging. Wholesale beef reached a record this week, and the U.S. cattle herd in January was the smallest since 1958.
Texas is facing its worst drought conditions in 44 years. Meanwhile, the northern plains have had too much moisture. As I’ve pointed out before, the Russian drought helped spark the civil unrest that has erupted across the Middle East and northern Africa in recent months. Floods in Australia, from “average” thunderstorms and some of the strongest landfalling hurricanes on record, have exacerbated the problem. Now North American crops and meat stocks are suffering.
Part of the cause behind all of this is the effects of global warming. This is what “just a 1F rise in global surface temperatures” means when the global trend manifests locally. There is another 1F future warming that will occur, even if we stopped our greenhouse gas pollution problem tomorrow. How much more warming; how many additional effects are we locking into the climate system because we’re addicted to dirty energy?
These stories will not stop or even meaningfully slow down any time soon. Instead, the scope and magnitude of temperature and precipitation extremes will continue to increase. The headlines of tomorrow will not look good, to put it mildly.
The main focus of this message is meant for Sen. Majority Leader Reid, but applies to anyone who is either actively working to prevent any energy or climate legislation from passing Congress or is offering up mealy-mouthed whines about how hard it is.
The climate doesn’t care, Sen. Reid. It doesn’t care about your chamber’s absurd set of rules; about how many votes you do or do not have; about your re-election campaign; about any political process or effort to fawn to the media.
The climate simply responds to forcing, of which humans have done and continue to do plenty of.
Think action on climate change is hard, Sen. Reid? Ask the Russians how hard their worst heat wave in recorded history was earlier this year. Ask the Pakistanis how hard the floods are making their lives. Ask some Africans how hard it is to feed and water their families when record drought continues to strike the region. Those folks are dealing with the industrialized world’s greenhouse gas pollution. Their lives are not only being made harder, but in a growing number of cases, impossible.
I’m sure they’ll all feel much more comfortable, and perhaps their lives will all get easier, as soon as they hear you might take up climate and energy issues piecemeal, because dealing with them in all their complexity is just more than you and your colleagues can seem to manage.
We’ll deal with this issue when we’re forced to and not much sooner, as I see it now. By then, of course, the costs associated with it will have skyrocketed and whatever actions we take will be less effective than they would be if started today. But Sen. Reid and others will have kept their hands on power as long as they possibly could along the way. That’s the truly important part to this story, after all.
The country of Yemen is experiencing a drought, which has lasted long enough to be causing societal problems. This isn’t terribly surprising, but neither is it covered by the American media very well. What will happen as the drought continues and the country’s population continues to destabilize? Al-Qaeda has already made significant inroads in the country, being just about the only group who has shown a willingness to do something for the people.
Yemen provides another good example of what we face as human forced climate change continues to take hold. Fresh, clean water is the most important commodity we have at this early stage of the 21st century. It will only become more so. As water tables drop, farmers’ crops fail and drought conditions spread and worsen across the globe, additional crises will foment and erupt.
We can continue to allow ideologically-driven conspiracy-addicts to dumb down the discussion, or we can take a reality-based look around us and decide to act now while our world is relatively stable and solutions are easier and cheaper to come by.
One of the well-documented effects of climate change in the future is increased probability of widespread and long-term drought. Related to those effects will be the accessibility of fresh water to meet the needs of ecosystems and human societies.
The Colorado River system is in the midst of a 10-year drought. Abundant geologic evidence shows that the region, without climate forcing by humans, is susceptible to decadal- to century-scale droughts. Post-2007 IPCC Report studies have dug further into the question of what future climates would be like under different CO2 emission scenarios. A related study that examined what different stream flows and projected changes in water demand would mean for the Colorado River System has been accepted to a peer-review journal, Water Resources Research. Keep in mind that the Colorado River System delivers water to 30 million people and a large number of ecosystems. Key components of the system for human use includes reservoirs. If stream flow is reduced for consecutive years, it will have far-ranging impacts that are not yet fully defined or explored. What is known is this: those reservoirs can’t capture what doesn’t flow through the System.
The researchers found that through 2026, the risk of fully depleting reservoir storage in any given year remains below 10% under any scenario of climate fluctuation or management alternative. That is certainly good news. During this same period, the reservoir storage could even recover from its current low level, which is currently at 59% of capacity. But if climate change results in a 10% reduction in the Colorado River’s average stream flow as some recent studies predict, the chances of fully depleting reservoir storage will exceed 25% by 2057, a much more worrisome outcome. Even more disturbing, if climate change results in a 20% flow reduction, the chances of fully depleting reservoir storage will exceed 50% by 2057. Exceeding a 50% probability is indicative of a critical danger to human societies and warns of unacceptable ecosystem collapse across a large region.
This is the future we could saddle future generations with. Or we can take action now, when the costs are still well within reach, and stop forcing the climate system as hard as we’re doing. Rep. John Salazar (D, CO-03) voted for the more dangerous future by joining with the two Colorado Republican Representatives and voting against H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. The remainder of the Colorado delegation, all Democrats, voted for the less risky future. The Senate should take up their version of the legislation this fall. Will Sens. Udall and Bennet vote for a better future? When (if?) a compromise bill comes up for a final vote, will legislators do the morally right thing? They’d better. 30 million+ people are at risk of becoming mighty thirsty.
The good news is slightly more attention is being paid to the issue of climate change in the media. The bad news is the dates being used don’t reflect the latest research to the degree they should. Since we have to take the bad with the good, I’m going to take a quick look at how the issue was handled recently. This Lifestyle article at MSN was about America post-2100. But since the overwhelming majority of climate change metrics are currently worse (as measured by observations) than they were forecasted to be for the 2007 IPCC Report, and since additional research since the Report was issued has moved up timelines for climate change effects, the article should relay to readers that the conditions within more accurately reflect post-2050 America than post-2100 America. But without further ado, let’s look at exactly what effects were discussed.
Pacific Northwest: Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska
What we could see in 2100 post-2050: Heavier rains, dramatic warming over higher latitudes and sea-level rise. According to recent research, Alaska has already experienced a 3.6 degree Fahrenheit increase since 1951, much more than the rest of America. The Northwest will also be affected by the forecasted two to three feet (or as much as 3-7 feet, according to more recent research) of sea level rise.
Northeast: Virginia to Maine
What we could see in 2100 post-2050: More severe storms in the winter and summer, extreme sea level rise and flooding. Indeed, a couple of recent journal articles I’ve read point out that if the land-based West Antarctica ice sheets melt this century, sea levels won’t rise by the same amount all over the globe. Sea levels off the U.S. Northeast coast will rise a couple of meters more than other places. Unfortunately, that region is also one of the most densely populated by people.
Southeast: The Gulf Coast states, up to Carolina
What we could see in 2100 post-2050: Hurricanes, wind damage, storm surges, flooding, extra sea level rise. Lots of people, lots of infrastructure. That means lots of money to either protect everything and everybody or move them inland.
The Northern Plains, Midwest and Great Lakes
What we could see in 2100 post-2050: Stronger storms (i.e. tornadoes, heavy rain events) occurring throughout the year as well as warmer winters. More intense storm systems mean increased chances of flash flooding across the region.
By not choosing to pay to address these potential effects now, we choose to pay more for them later. Protection along the coasts, more flood defense systems, dropping water tables higher rates of disease associated with warmer conditions, among others, will all have an adverse financial effect. Larger clean-up and rescue efforts will cost more. Building insurance rates will skyrocket – forcing more and more people to go without or move inland whether the coasts are protected or not. What will loss of part of population centers mean for businesses and urban cores?
These changes will more likely occur sooner rather than later. More people in the U.S. need to understand that potential so that more realistic policies can be set.
