"There Was No Rain"

Climate change refugees are on the march and they're coming not just from Africa or the Middle East or some low-lying atoll in the South Pacific, they're migrating poleward in the Americas too.

Todd Miller went to southern Mexico to interview climate migrants. Where are they from? Where are they headed? Given the dangers, why?



When I first talked to the three Honduran men in the train yard in the southern Mexican town of Tenosique, I had no idea that they were climate-change refugees. We were 20 miles from the border with Guatemala at a rail yard where Central American refugees often congregated to try to board La Bestia (“the Beast”), the nickname given to the infamous train that has proven so deadly for those traveling north toward the United States.

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 When I asked why they were heading for the United States, one responded simply, “No hubo lluvia.” (“There was no rain.”) In their community, without rain, there had been neither crops, nor a harvest, nor food for their families, an increasingly common phenomenon in Central America. In 2015, for instance, 400,000 people living in what has become Honduras’s “dry corridor” planted their seeds and waited for rain that never came. As in a number of other places on this planet in this century, what came instead was an extreme drought that stole their livelihoods.

For Central America, this was not an anomaly. Not only had the region been experiencing increasing mid-summer droughts, but also, as the best climate forecasting models predict, a “much greater occurrence of very dry seasons” lies in its future. Central America is, in fact, “ground zero” for climate change in the Americas, as University of Arizona hydrology and atmospheric sciences professor Chris Castro told me. And on that isthmus, the scrambling of the seasons, an increasingly deadly combination of drenching hurricanes and parching droughts, will hit people already living in the most precarious economic and political situations. Across Honduras, for example, more than76% of the population lives in conditions of acute poverty. The coming climate breakdowns will only worsen that or will, as Castro put it, be part of a global situation in which “the wet gets wetter, the dry gets drier, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Everything gets more extreme.”

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“Although the exact number of people that will be on the move by mid-century is uncertain,” wrote the authors of the report In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement, “the scope and scale could vastly exceed anything that has occurred before.” And here’s the sad reality of our moment: for such developments, the world is remarkably unprepared. There isn’t even a legal framework for dealing with climate refugees, either in international law or the laws of specific countries. The only possible exception: New Zealand’s “special refugee visas” for small numbers of Pacific Islanders displaced by rising seas.

The only real preparations for such a world are grim ones: walls and the surveillance technology that goes with them. Most climate-displaced people travelling internationally without authorization will sooner or later run up against those walls and the armed border guards meant to turn them back. And if the United States or the European Union is their destination, any possible doors such migrants might enter will be slammed shut by countries that, historically, are the world’s largest greenhouse gas polluters and so most implicated in climate change. (Between 1850 and 2011, the United States was responsible for 27% of the world’s emissions and the countries of the European Union, 25%.)

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I was just east of Agua Prieta in the Mexican state of Sonora, a mere 25 feet from the U.S.-Mexican border. I could clearly see the barrier there and a U.S. Border Patrol agent in a green-striped truck looking back at me from the other side of the divide. Perhaps a quarter mile from where I stood, I could also spot an Integrated Fixed Tower, one of 52 new high-tech surveillance platforms built in the last two years in southern Arizona by the Israeli company Elbit Systems. Since that tower’s cameras are capable of spotting objects and people seven miles away, I had little doubt that agents in a nearby command and control center were watching me as well. There, they would also have had access to the video feeds from Predator B drones, once used on the battlefields of the Greater Middle East, but now flying surveillance missions in the skies above the border. There, too, the beeping alarms of thousands of motion sensors implanted throughout the U.S. border zone would ring if you dared cross the international divide.

Only 15 years ago, very little of this existed. Now, the whole region -- and most of this preceded Donald Trump’s election victory -- has become a de facto war zone. Climate refugees, having made their way through the checkpoints and perils of Mexico, will now enter a land where people without papers are tracked in complex, high-tech electronic ways, hunted, arrested, incarcerated, and expelled, sometimes with unfathomable cruelty. To a border agent, the circumstances behind the flight of those three Honduran farmers would not matter. Only one thing would -- not how or why you had come, but if you were in the United States without the proper documentation.

Climate change, increased global migration, and expanding border enforcement are three linked phenomena guaranteed to come to an explosive head in this century. In the United States, the annual budgets for border and immigration policing regimes have already skyrocketed from about $1.5 billion in the early 1990s to $20 billion in 2017, a number that represents the combined budgets of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. During that period, the number of Border Patrol agents quintupled, 700 miles of walls and barriers were constructed (long before Donald Trump began talking about his “big, fat, beautiful wall”), and billions of dollars of technology were deployed in the border region.

Such massive border fortification isn’t just a U.S. phenomenon. In 1988, when the Berlin Wall fell, there were 15 border walls in the world. Now, according to border scholar Elisabeth Vallet, there are 70. These walls generally have risen between the richer countries and the poorer ones, between those that have the heavier carbon footprints and those plunged into Parenti’s “catastrophic convergence” of political, economic, and ecological crises. This is true whether you’re talking about the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, or Asia.

As Paul Currion points out, even some countries that are only comparatively wealthy are building such “walls,” often under pressure and with considerable financial help. Take Turkey. Its new “smart border” with drought-stricken and conflict-embroiled Syria is one of many examples globally. It now has a new tower every 1,000 feet, a three-language alarm system, and “automated firing zones” supported by hovering zeppelin drones. “It appears that we’ve entered a new arms race,” writes Currion, “one appropriate for an age of asymmetric warfare, with border walls replacing ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles].”

India is typical in constructing a steel wall along its lengthy border with Bangladesh, a country expected to have millions of displaced people in the decades to come, thanks to sea level rise and storm surges. In these years, with so many people on the move from the embattled Greater Middle East and Africa, the countries of the European Union have also been doubling down on border protection, with enforcement budgets soaring to 50 times what they were in 2005.

The trends are already clear: the world will be increasingly carved up into highly monitored border surveillance zones. Market projections show that global border and homeland security industries are already booming across the planet. The broader global security market is poised to nearly double between 2011 and 2022 (from $305 billion to $546 billion). And, not so surprisingly, a market geared to climate-related catastrophes is already on the verge of surpassing $150 billion.

This is the world that Gwynne Dyer described a decade ago in his book, "Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival As the World Overheats." In it, the author describes how the Pentagon plans to militarize America's coasts and land borders (to the south anyway). He also notes that American military planners are looking at ideas such as robotic, free fire killing zones where, out of sight and out of mind, would be migrants will be slaughtered.

It's fair to say that many Americans, perhaps most, are already conditioned, pre-disposed to see the brown peoples to their south as a peril. Trump tells them these illegals are rapists and worse. The time-honoured steps to dehumanize a targeted group are well underway and they're finding a receptive audience.

Also bear in mind what is happening in American society. The nation is being fractured, left (or what passes for left down there) and right. Some claim the American people haven't been so deeply divided since the Civil War. Social cohesion is being undermined and, to some extent, deliberately. The US has the highest rates of inequality - of wealth, income and opportunity - among the developed nations. There is a gaping divide between the plutocracy on one side and the precariat on the other. Some see in this the emergence of a true aristocracy and the evolution of a state of neo-feudalism. White supremacists and fascists now march freely through America's streets. These shifts do not a welcoming society engender.

Another powerful factor that will come into play will be the climate change plight that will be experienced by the American people across the southern states. Climatically everything is worsening. Severe storm events, hurricanes and tornadoes of worsening intensity. Severe weather events, floods and droughts, of increasing frequency, duration and intensity. The depletion of once abundant groundwater resources. Worsening heat events and fires. Sea level rise, storm surges and saltwater inundation. America is facing the real prospect of dealing with an internally displaced population, IDPs. In a country with America's standard of living that can be a hugely costly burden on the state, especially one that is now in the process of being defunded through tax "reform" and other bleed off mechanisms. If the society has to struggle to resettle its own IDPs, how likely is it to be welcoming to climate migrants from other lands?

It's the D-Word and It's Arrived in Canada

Prime minister Cletis doesn't seem to have noticed that global warming has arrived in his very own backyard.  Funny how he can't hear all those local Tories squealing like pigs over the drought setting in across the West.

It's the sort of think I watch out of the corner of my eye, hoping that somehow what's happening isn't.

Even where I live we usually get somewhere between one and five or six days of snow every winter.   This year - nada, zip, zilch.  Truth be told we didn't get a winter this year.  I even topped off my woodshed with an extra cord of logging leftovers but I used, in total, less than a third of a cord keeping the house warm in the cold spells.  A lot of days I got by just fine with a warm sweater.

The real problem, however, is the lack of snowpack on the local mountains.  That snowpack is really important to the wildlife on the island.  The summer melt helps reduce forest fires.  It's also vital to salmon spawning.  Those salmon are critical for eagles, bears, wolves and other predators.  Those fish are an essential part of our food chain.  If we catch a break the salmon will simply stay out in the ocean and try again next year.  If they do come upstream there's a serious chance there won't be enough cool melt water in the streams to keep their eggs alive in the hot spells.  And, when the food chain breaks down it's a real good idea to keep a close eye on your cats and fluffy doglets.

The drought progressed steadily over the winter from California to Oregon and on into Washington.  Drought doesn't recognize borders very well and so it arrived in the True North, even the normally soggy parts.

Until recently I wasn't aware of the state of the prairies.  Then I read a June 21 post on Saskboy's (John Klein) blog talking about Regina getting its first rain of the year.  Hells Bells, we might have missed out on snow but we sure got rain, including the odd deluge over the winter.  Regina didn't get a real rain until June 21?

They've been keeping rainfall records of the prairies for 68-years and the 68th is shaping up to be, hands down, the driest of the lot.  Worse still, the weather boffins are expecting nothing but heat waves continuing straight into September. That means crop failures.

"June is typically the wet month, the month where crops are growing feverishly, and it just hasn't happened," said David Phillips, Environment Canada's senior climatologist, in Barrie, Ont. "So people are using the D-words: dryness, drought, no question about it."

Compounding the problem is that the dry spring came on the heels of one of the warmest, driest winters, particularly in parts of British Columbia and Alberta.

These dry conditions are a stark contrast to a wet spring last year and the heavy rains and run-off from melting snow pack in the Rocky Mountains that led to damaging floods in Alberta in 2013.

The wild swings in weather have even inspired a new term in climate circles called "weather whiplash," Phillips said.

"It has been one extreme to another, and it has been a tremendous challenge for farmers, ranchers and growers. They can't deal with these kind of weird, wild, and wacky kind of changes."

It makes you wonder whether the Petro-Pols of Parliament Hill (that's pretty much the lot of them except for that one lady who keeps fighting to be heard) are going to wake up and smell the dustbowl.  

Severe weather events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration in a pattern of cyclical and devastating droughts and floods.  I think I read that somewhere. Oh yeah, it's a warning that's been repeated in literally thousands of scientific studies and reports for many, many years - science that has gone effectively unheeded in the ranks of Tories, Liberals and New Dems alike.

Eventually some of you will come to realize that you have to be a crazy bugger to keep supporting those Petro-Pols and their neoliberal policies.  At some point you'll have to sit down and tally up what their market fundamentalism has done for and to us and what lies in store for your kids and theirs if we keep going down this path.

Connecting the Dots on Climate Change

One of the biggest failures in climate change reporting is the tendency to focus on particular aspects without considering the bigger picture.  What does sea level rise have to do with droughts or floods?  What is the role of changing ocean circulation patterns?  How do these impacts all factor into our rapidly changing jet stream?

When we look at individual aspects we usually wind up with charts that reveal a linear pattern.  Sure, there may be dramatic increases on the curve, but nothing that appears wild or unpredictable.

Yet we're nearing the point where climate change impacts will be wild and unpredictable, totally non-linear.  A big part of this results from the "cascade effect" in which a number of seemingly unrelated impacts begin operating together, even harnessing man-made change with natural feedback mechanisms that will be much harder to control and nearly impossible to reverse.  We can expect to be overtaken by fast-developing events and very possibly without adaptation strategies or preparations.  In the scope of climate change, it's like we've all but given up.

An online course being presented by Germany's prestigious Potsdam Institute provides the missing link.  It begins to connect all the dots to reveal how changes already underway that will continue to accelerate and worsen even if we miraculously decarbonize today to make our world a far more difficult place for almost all forms of life.

One example is the Greenland ice sheet.  As it melts, the cold freshwater released to the sea has a direct impact on the thermohalene circulation (Gulf Stream) which, in turn, speeds up the decline in the Arctic sea ice and the thawing of high latitude permafrost and the loss of Alpine glaciers.

As the Arctic warms the temperature differential between the Arctic and temperate latitudes narrows,  weakening the jet stream and giving rise to Rossby waves, blocking events that can stall weather fronts in a particular location for upwards of four weeks.  These Rossby waves are responsible for Atlanta, Georgia falling into a February deep freeze while a village in Alaska hits temps. in the 60s.  These Rossby waves created the conditions for the Calgary flood and triggered the recent drought in Russia that ruined the wheat harvest there.

The Amazon rainforest governs precipitation patterns in much of South America. A warming beyond 2C carries the risk of transforming the Amazon into savannah grasslands, upending essential rainfall needed for many millions of Brazilians and their neighbours.

The hydrologic cycle is the climate change cycle.  Our civilization is utterly dependent on the steady and predictable supply of precipitation for human needs (drinking, cooking, sanitation), for agricultural production and for industry. When precipitation falters and becomes unreliable or sporadic, there goes your economy and, with it, your civilization.   This is nothing new.  We have a rich history of this sort of societal collapse.

Already billions lack adequate access to safe water.  Billions do not have access to basic sanitation.  Even as we experience growing water scarcity many of the most vulnerable countries also heavily contaminate their freshwater resources. This is compounded by deteriorating ecosystems and by failing infrastructure and lack of investment.  Water is something we're all too ready to fight over when scarcity sets in and there are few coherent international policies to deal with conflict.

Two areas expected to be among the hardest hit are Africa and Asia.  They're also experiencing explosive population growth.  They're going to be especially vulnerable to droughts, floods and sea level rise.  It's estimated the world will need to up food production by 50-70% by 2050 to keep up with the growing population yet these climate change impacts, taken cumulatively, will cause a sharp decline in food production in the most needy areas.  Draw your own conclusions as to how that will play out especially in the Hindu Kush.

Our ecosystems are in a migratory transition.  Plants and animals alike are responding to climate change by steadily moving away from the equator. Although you may think otherwise in central and eastern Canada, Spring is now arriving two weeks earlier globally.  Pests and disease are also migrating.  West Nile virus is one example.  Above 2C be prepared for a spread of malaria and a sharp increase in infections.  As it warms the incubation period for malaria plummets and mosquitoes bite a lot more.  Water-related diseases from cholera to typhus to dysentery also increase.

It's critical to consider the effect this warming already underway will have on biodiversity.  Many species are incapable of evolving to survive the current, early onset, rate of change.  If we fail to arrest global warming at 2C (now considered highly unlikely) and instead allow it to reach 4C, the number of species lost will skyrocket. 2C simply gives many species a window to survive through adaptation, evolution migration.

This week it was announced that, in March, we set another record when every part of the planet experienced GHG concentrations about 400 ppm. Everywhere. To put that in perspective, our coral reefs cannot survive long beyond 350 ppm. of atmospheric CO2.  It's calculated that 1.5C of warming will kill off all but 10% of the world's corals.  Here's the thing.  It was recently reported that our existing emissions, what we've already put into the atmosphere, will "lock in" 1.5C of warming by 2100.  We've already pulled the Celsius trigger.  Now we've pulled the acidification trigger.  Sea level rise stresses corals.  So do severe storm events such as the cyclones savaging the central western Pacific.

As I went through the lectures from these top world scientists, leaders in their own disciplines, in looking to what awaits in a 4C world each said the same thing - "all bets are off."  Each of them described their field in the context of a climate change impacts "cascade" but noted that these combined impacts and they synergies are beyond anything in the experience of human and other life forms. Most also pointed out that, by the time we get to understand the cascade fallout, it'll be too late to do anything about it.

To sum up, we've got two choices - just the two.  Either decarbonize now, just as quickly as humanly possible, or "don't worry, be happy."  

California Down to Its Last Year of Water

A report in the LA Times claims that California has freshwater reserves for but one more year.


As our “wet” season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows. We're not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we're losing the creek too.

...As difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought. NASA data reveal that total water storage in California has been in steady decline since at least 2002, when satellite-based monitoring began, although groundwater depletion has been going on since the early 20th century.

Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.

In short, we have no paddle to navigate this crisis.

When the Taps Run Dry, Where Do You Go?

Sao Paulo Riots

Imagine telling the residents of Toronto that they have to flee the city and travel elsewhere in search of water.  Well something along those lines may be in store for the millions of residents of Brazil's largest city, Sao Paulo.

As south-east Brazil grapples with its worst drought in nearly a century, a problem worsened by polluted rivers, deforestation and population growth, the largest reservoir system serving Sao Paulo is near depletion. Many residents are already enduring sporadic water cut-offs, some going days without it. Officials say that drastic rationing may be needed, with water service provided only two days a week.

Behind closed doors, the views are grimmer. In a meeting recorded secretly and leaked to the local news media, Paulo Massato, a senior official at Sao Paulo's water utility, said that residents might have to be warned to flee because "there's not enough water, there won't be water to bathe, to clean" homes.

"We're witnessing an unprecedented water crisis in one of the world's great industrial cities", said Marussia Whately, a water specialist at Instituto Socioambiental, a Brazilian environmental group. "Because of environmental degradation and political cowardice, millions of people in Sao Paulo are now wondering when the water will run out."

For some in this traffic-choked megacity of futuristic skyscrapers, gated communities and sprawling slums, the slow-burning crisis has already meant no running water for days on end.

...Experts say the origins of the crisis go beyond the recent drought to include an array of interconnected factors: the city's surging population growth in the 20th century; a chronically leaky system that spills vast amounts of water before it can reach homes; notorious pollution in the Tiete and Pinheiros rivers traversing the city (their aroma can induce nausea in passers-by); and the destruction of surrounding forests and wetlands that have historically soaked up rain and released it into reservoirs.

Deforestation in the Amazon River basin, hundreds of kilometres away, may also be adding to Sao Paulo's water crisis. Cutting the forest reduces its capacity to release humidity into the air, diminishing rainfall in southeast Brazil, according to a recent study by one of the country's leading climate scientists.

Officials also point to global warming. "Climate change has arrived to stay", Geraldo Alckmin, the governor of Sao Paulo state, said in February. "When it rains, it rains too much, and when there's drought, it's way too dry."

Imagine going three days at a stretch without fresh water.  The UN calculates we need 20-liters a day just for basic hydration, cooking and sanitation.   Studies have found that we in the developed world use the toilet about 5-times daily which consumes 34-liters per day for low-flow toilets up to 72-liters per day for older toilets (some are much higher).  That makes it pretty tough for a family living in a high-rise apartment to just meet their basic sanitation needs unless everyone starts emptying their chamber pots over the balcony.  

Protesters Swarm Rio

Unrest is building as would be expected, anti-government riots breaking out every now and then in Sao Paulo, Rio and more than 100-other Brazillian towns and cities.. 20-million people can't live this way.  How do you relocate many millions of internally displaced people?  Where do they go?  Where will they find services and housing much less jobs and schools and everything else that supports modern life?  

Brazil may become the poster child for this sort of First World problem.  And the Third World is also reeling from water shortages.

When Khawaja Muhammad Asif, [Pakistan's] Minister of Defense, Power, and Water (yes, that is one ministry), warned that the country’s chronic water shortages could soon become uncontrollable, he was looking on the bright side. The meagre allotment of water available to each Pakistani is a third of what it was in 1950 . As the country’s population rises, that amount is falling fast.

...Nowhere, however, is the situation more acute than in Brazil, particularly for the twenty million residents of São Paulo. “You have all the elements for a perfect storm, except that we don’t have water,” a former environmental minister told Lizzie O’Leary, in a recent interview for the syndicated radio show “Marketplace.” The country is bracing for riots. “There is a real risk of social convulsion,” José Galizia Tundisi, a hydrologist with the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, warned in a press conference last week. He said that officials have failed to act with appropriate urgency. “Authorities need to act immediately to avoid the worst.” But people rarely act until the crisis is directly affecting them, and at that point it will be too late.

Feeding a planet with nine billion residents will require at least fifty per cent more water in 2050 than we use today. It is hard to see where that water will come from. Half of the planet already lives in urban areas, and that number will increase along with the pressure to supply clean water.

...The result of continued inaction is clear. Development experts, who rarely agree on much, all agree that water wars are on the horizon. That would be nothing new for humanity. After all, the word “rivals” has its roots in battles over water—coming from the Latin, rivalis, for “one taking from the same stream as another.” It would be nice to think that, with our complete knowledge of the physical world, we have moved beyond the limitations our ancestors faced two thousand years ago. But the truth is otherwise; rivals we remain, and the evidence suggests that, until we start dying of thirst, we will stay that way.

21st Century Assyrians

Overpopulation + Drought = Collapse.  Just ask any Assyrian.  Of course they've been gone since the 7th century so that's not very practical.

Historians have long wondered how the Assyrians, the military powerhouse of their region, were taken down by Babylonian forces at Nineveh in 612.   New research shows the Assyrians were already down and on their way out.  The Babylonians just finished the job.

Experts from UC San Diego and Koc University, Istanbul, have discovered that overpopulation and sustained drought caused the empire to collapse, leading the neighbours to move in.

Analysis of the area's weather patterns from paleoclimatic records found that this drought was part of a long period of drought that lasted for several years.

Adam Schneider, from the University of California, said: "As far as we know, ours is the first study to put forward the hypothesis that climate change - specifically drought - helped to destroy the Assyrian Empire."

At the same time, the Assyrian Empire was suffering from overpopulation. Society had grown unsustainably large during the reign of King Sennacherib and the Empire was "fatally weakened".

Within five years, Assyria was ravaged by civil wars. "We're not saying that the Assyrians suddenly starved to death or were forced to wander off into the desert en masse, abandoning their cities," Schneider said. "Rather, we're saying that drought and overpopulation affected the economy and destabilised the political system to a point where the empire couldn't withstand unrest and the onslaught of other peoples."

The researchers said the collapse of the Assyrian Empire is comparable with the current political situation in the Syria and northern Iraq. They also draw parallels with cities like San Diego and Los Angeles, where areas grow too large for their environments.

"The Assyrians can be 'excused' to some extent for focusing on short-term economic or political goals which increased their risk of being negatively impacted by climate change, given their technological capacity and their level of scientific understanding about how the natural world works," the authors wrote.

"We, however, have no such excuses, and we also possess the additional benefit of hindsight, which allows us to piece together from the past what can go wrong if we choose not to enact policies that promote longer-term sustainability."

Feed'Em or Weep

They're finally figuring it out.  An editorial from The Dallas Morning News warns that unless the US launches a major food relief effort to Central America, the country faces a tsunami of refugees fleeing to the US to escape famine.

The swarm of immigrants who came across the border this year, including more than 60,000 unaccompanied minors, could wind up paling in comparison to an immigration crisis looming on the horizon. Famine is a growing concern across Central America because of persistent drought. 

...The next wave ...could be driven by a much more formidable force: abject hunger. Central America is in the middle of a serious two-year drought. USAID’s Famine Early Warning System stated in early August that Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua are on the verge of a food crisis because of growing, widespread crop failures from scant rainfall. In some areas, rainfall is 50 percent to 75 percent below average.

The drought also is affecting Costa Rica and Panama. Panama Canal operations are on the verge of being curtailed because of declining levels on the freshwater lake that comprises the bulk of the canal route.

Elsewhere, farm output is expected to drop as much as 70 percent. Prices for staple foods like maize and beans are escalating. A coffee bean blight is adding to economic woes. Thousands of Central Americans who rely on subsistence farming no longer know where their meals will come from. The famine report warns that the need for food could cause residents to pack up and leave.

“This situation is particularly critical in northern Nicaragua, where the drought has had the greatest impact,” the famine report says. “These factors will force households in the areas of concern to implement atypical response strategies including atypical migration and sale of household assets.”

The editorial argues for the use of food aid to relieve famine and as an incentive for Central Americans to stay put.

Floods Come and Go But Drought Likes to Climb Onto Your Back and Stay There

We hear lots about California and it's three-year-running drought that has left the State in severe water stress.  Wells are running dry, emergency bottled water has to be brought in to help the poor survive, orchards are being bulldozed as the trees die off, Nestle keeps plundering the state to bottle water for other places, municipalities are finally preparing to recycle waste water, etc., etc.

The "exceptional" drought zone is spreading ever northward, nearing the Oregon border.  Officials from Humboldt County say the Eel River levels are at unprecedented lows and people along the coast are not ready for what's coming.

Coastal areas of Humboldt County have not see the impacts of the drought as directly as inland portions, leading many residents to be unaware of the critical situation, said Dan Ehresman, director of the North Coast Environmental Center.

"People are disconnected from where our water comes from," Ehresman said. "It is easy not to think about the conditions in the rest of the county."

In the wine country, growers have cut back on drip irrigation but still hope their vines will make it through the summer.  It's next year that's on their mind.  They need relief in the form of rainfall over the winter.

Bad as a 3-year drought may be, a report from Cornell University, the University of Arizona and the U.S. Geological Survey concludes that America's southwest is at risk of a 10-year drought this century.

The researchers found that when accounting for climate change, there is a 20-50 percent chance of a 35-year long megadrought in the next century, depending on the region. There is a 5-10 percent chance of a 50-year megadrought, they reported.

The computer models also found that California, Arizona and New Mexico will be at increased risk for drought, but that the risk could decrease for parts of Washington, Montana and Idaho.

Apparel companies are looking for alternatives to replace cotton.

VF Corp. (NYSE:VFC), which makes Lee and Wrangler jeans, Timberland shoes and The North Face fleece jackets, said it started looking to diversify its raw materials several years ago, after bad weather events in China and Pakistan -- two of the world’s largest cotton growers -- hit the company’s cotton supply. While the crop grows especially well in hot climates, it is extremely sensitive to water. Not enough H20, and cotton chokes at the vine; too much, and its roots rot.

In the coming decades, water scarcity spurred by climate change will likely hit cotton the most in China's Xinjian county, Pakistan, Australia and the western United States, according to the International Trade Center, a joint agency of the World Trade Organization and the United Nations. Extreme heat waves could also harm cotton crops, as will an abundance of insects, which are expected to adapt and thrive in new environmental conditions.

It's hard to imagine how a modern society like the American southwest could endure a 10-year drought.  A 35 or a 50-year drought would likely render the area uninhabitable.

In Drought News

Central America continues to reel under severe, multi-year drought.  Guatemala has declared a state of emergency in 16 of the country's 22-provinces.  Experts believe the impact on agriculture could soon leave hundreds of thousands of families without food.

As America's west coast and southwest continue to be plagued by drought, an article at Treehugger examines how Americans might look to Canadian waters to ease their pain.  The article revives a long-forgotten idea to dam James Bay and divert the excess freshwater via canal to Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. Presumably the diverted James Bay water would then be drawn into the U.S. via the Mississippi River.

In Australia, farmers are bracing for a possible, late season El Nino to worsen an already serious drought.

When a scorching drought struck eastern Australia in 2006, cattle farmers Robyn and Paul Kendal had to slaughter nearly all their livestock and spend around a year of their normal turnover on feed to keep the remainder alive.

With a recurrence of El Niño, the weather pattern behind the drought, looming and dry conditions already affecting an area larger than South Africa, another major drought could be one struggle too many for farmers such as the Kendals.

"In 2006, we saw the lowest amount of rains here since records began...and we still haven’t recovered from that even today," said Robyn Kendal, whose 3,000-acre (1,215 hectares) cattle farm is about 500 km (300 miles) southwest of Sydney.

China's agricultural heartland is said to be experiencing its worst drought in 63-years.  In Brazil, severe drought is impacting agriculture and urban water supply. The city of Sao Paolo could run dry within a few months.

Across the Middle East and East Africa, most of the conflict hot spots - Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia and Sudan - reveal how destabilizing drought can be in vulnerable countries.

The good news is that world cereal grain production is up this year thanks to good crops in the U.S., the E.U. and India.

This Is What Happens When You Run Out of Water.

Could you get by for three weeks with 12-gallons of water?  That's a smidge over 45-litres which works out to about 2 litres per day.

In Porterville, California, the county Office of Emergency Services, has delivered bottled water to 182 households where wells have now run dry.  12-gallons of water per head.  Three weeks rations.  Two litres per person per day.

East Porterville resident Angelica Gallegos fought back tears as she described being without water for four months in the home she shares with her husband,, three children and two other adults.

"It's hard," she told The Bee. "I can't shower the children like I used to."

Farmworker Oliva Sanchez said she still gets a trickle from her tap, but dirt started coming out with the water about a week ago.

"I try to use the least possible. I'll move if I have to," she said.

Along with experiencing inconvenience and thirst, some residents have been reluctant to speak up about being waterless because they are afraid their landlords will evict them or social workers will take their children away.

Minimum daily requirements for basic hydration are about 3-litres per day.  The UN says the daily minimum requirement per person for drinking, cooking, hygiene and sanitation is 20-litres per day.

To put that in perspective, the per capita water consumption for domestic purposes in Canada is 329-litres per day.

Meanwhile Texas is still holding out hopes for a long overdue El Nino to develop to bring "drought buster" rains this fall.

Update -

I somehow stumbled across an editorial in the Porterville Recorder dealing with the drought relief programme.  The op-ed laments that the local municipal council is using the emergency as a political football.  It seems there's an election campaign underway.

I was also struck by the libertarian views of the editors to a situation they describe as a "humanitarian crisis."

"While we strongly support efforts to help those residents who are without water, we do not feel taxpayer money should be used.  This needs to be a community effort and the city's role should stop at helping to coordinate all efforts, especially by volunteers."  

The disconnect between the municipal government and the "community" is bizarre.  The municipal government surely is the political embodiment of the community and it acts on behalf of the community.  If "the community" was going to respond to this "humanitarian crisis", chances are it would have done just that long before the muni had to purchase and distribute bottled water.

Then again, this ad appeared just beside the op-ed.

The Mystery of California's Vanishing Groundwater

You may have already heard about it.  California, the Golden State, is reeling from three years of continuous, severe drought.

Of course you've heard about it.  The California drought is in the news almost daily.  The problem with an event like this is putting it in perspective.

Here's a new way of looking at it.  The drought is now estimated to have claimed 63-trillion gallons of groundwater across the Western United States.  That water loss is said to have caused the surface levels in the region to rise 0.16 of an inch over the past 18-months.

The estimates come via the Scrips Institute of Oceanography and the U.S. Geological Survey.

In California's Sierra mountains, the loss of annual snowpack has caused a surface rise of 0.6 of an inch.

But something doesn't add up.

The report doesn't appear to mention where, exactly, that missing groundwater is to be found.  Some of it has been added to the warming atmosphere but evaporation and transpiration are components of the hydrological cycle that carries water vapour into the atmosphere where it is transformed into clouds and returns to the surface as rain.

So, yes, it's believable that the Western U.S. has suffered a massive loss of groundwater but that moisture has to be somewhere, in some form, adding its weight to someplace else.  That could be in the form of flash floods sweeping so many places east of California.

Another impact of the drought is power generation.  California's hydro-electric capacity has been hard hit causing the state to fall back on natural gas for generating electricity.  That could be a blow to California's carbon emissions reduction targets.

Famine In the Americas

Red Cross food relief for central Mexico

When we think of famine, we tend to think of Africa.  Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan seem to come to mind.

FEWS Net, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, has identified Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and central Nicaragua as countries most at risk of severe food insecurity in 2015.  Coffee rust has disrupted incomes for many farm workers even as food prices rise due to sustained drought.

Income is also expected to be below-average over the coming year. For the third consecutive year, demand for coffee labor and wages received by coffee day laborers are expected to be lower than normal, due to the persistent effects of coffee rust. Other livelihoods in the region, including fishing and livestock breeding, have also been negatively affected by the recent drought and the transition toward an El Niño.

Compounding this situation are above-average and increasing prices of regionally-produced staple foods (maize and beans) in some areas.  The countries most affected in this regard are Nicaragua and Honduras, where red bean prices rose by up to 129 percent between January and June 2014. Prices are expected to continue to trend upward through the end of the first harvest, in September, then level off for a brief period, and then increase again until December, primarily as a result of current crop losses and the potential losses to Postrera crops projected for late 2014. 

Could famine hit the Americas?  That appears to be a possibility although it's hard to imagine that Canada, the U.S. and the major countries of South America would be slow to respond with relief.   

Meanwhile, the government of Nicaragua has advised its people how to fend of hunger - eat iguanas.

"Breeding iguanas brings two benefits," said Guillermo Membreno, a land management expert.  "Not only does it supply dietary protein, it also offers a commercial use for the animals."

Iguanas, he added, contained 24% protein compared with 18% in chicken.

Your Global Warming Surcharge Coming Soon

Reservoir, What Reservoir?

So, you see, you've got this conjunction of forces.  There are more of us by the day, about 220,000 every 24-hours and that's a net increase.  And then our ever larger population is also movin' on up.  We're making progress on reducing poverty and those mega-populated, emerging economies are spawning their own middle, or consumer classes that want pretty much everything that you or I take for granted - nice houses, cars, holidays abroad, consumer goods of every description and better food.  There's the first part of your problem - demand.  It's way up.

The second part of your problem is supply.  Unlike demand, supply may be heading in the other direction.  You see, we've changed the climate.  We've changed the channel.  We're into a new climate now and when it comes to meeting our growing demand, it's less than ideal.  Climate change is making wet regions wetter and dry regions dryer.  In the case of dry regions that often means drought.
Unfortunately these warm, dry regions have also been where we get a lot of what we eat.  Think of California, North America's supplier of fruits, nuts and, of course, wine.  The Golden State is still getting plenty of sunshine but precious little rainfall and farmers are struggling with drought.  Even orchards are being lost.

Now word is out that the world's main olive producer, Spain, is also in the throes of terrible drought.  Spain produces half the world's olives and most of our olive oil.  Expect to pay more soon for olive oil.  European prices have already jumped 30% this year.  Unfortunately this is a problem we're going to be facing ever more in years to come.

Here's the thing.  We can grow olives elsewhere in our warming world.  The problem is it takes nearly 35-years from planting until an olive grove comes into production.  So there's bound to be a period of disruption and, while that lasts, expect to pay for it at the check out.

And, by the way, look for domestic food prices to nudge higher this year.  China is in the midst of its worst drought in 63-years in its northern agricultural belt.  The crop shortfall could send China to the world markets, driving up prices for wheat and other grains.

Don't fret, we still have enough wealth disparity that we can continue to buy our way out of these shortages, for now.  People at the bottom end of the wealth scale, let's just call them the poor, don't have as many options.  They do without or find substitutes like dirt and grass.

Range Wars, 21st Century-Style

It's a classic theme of the 'wild west' - range wars where free-range cattle ranchers clashed with farmers whose fenced fields blocked their way.  Today it's a struggle between farmers and frackers and this time the struggle is over water, more specifically who gets it and who goes without.

This has been going on in Texas for some time and, generally, it's the frackers who win.  Now the same thing has flared up in drought-stricken California, especially in the rich agricultural area of the Monterey Basin beneath which lies an awful lot of fossil fuel just waiting to be fracked.

Despite several polls indicating that a majority of California residents are opposed to the “water-intensive extreme oil and gas extraction process” known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the state’s Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has continued to pledge his support for pro-fracking legislation.

 

As Brown gets closer to signing a piece of legislation that would allow for the expansion of fracking and other controversial forms of oil extraction in California’s Monterey Shale formation, located beneath California’s “most prized” farmland, opponents have boosted their work to ban fracking in the state.

 

On this one, Jerry Brown is dead wrong.  Those oil and gas reserves have been securely sequestered underground for millions of years.  They're not going anywhere.  They'll still be right where they sit when the drought ends.  It's the farmers who have long contributed to California's prosperity that are at mortal risk if they're not given priority access over frackers to the limited water supply.

The Relief of California

Desperately needed rain may be enroute to northern California.  With any luck some agricultural production may be saved.  There's hope that an El Nino believed to be building in the Pacific will indulge California with a good drenching next winter.

America's Mini-Civil Wars

There's one brewing in the midwest, another raging in the southeast and a third building in the southwest.   They're regional, inter-state conflicts over distribution of dwindling groundwater resources.

In the southeast, the Army Corps of Engineers is under simultaneous attack by lawsuits from Georgia, Florida and Alabama, each state accusing the Corps of unfairly giving too much of their shared water resource to the others.  It's a situation that could well worsen quickly as sea level rise begins to impact freshwater reserves including the Everglades.

In the southwest, it's the Colorado River under pressure from several states and which, by treaty, is supposed to be shared with Mexico.

It is in the drought-stricken midwest, America's heartland, that the newest battles are occurring.

The water wars are raging again in America's heartland, where drought-stricken states are pleading for the increasingly scarce water of the Missouri River — to drink from their faucets, irrigate their crops and float the barges that carry billions of dollars of agricultural products to market.

From Montana to West Virginia, officials on both sides have written President Barack Obama urging him to intervene — or not — in a long-running dispute over whether water from the Missouri's upstream reservoirs should be released into the Mississippi River to ease low water levels that have imperiled commercial traffic.

The quarrel pits boaters, fishermen and tourism interests against communities downstream and companies that rely on the Mississippi to do business.

In Oklahoma, they're reporting the drought has leveled off.   It usually does by the time river beds look like this:

And, in case you thought of drought as a seasonal scourge, think again.  Reuters is the latest to report that the drought that hammered America's midwest this summer is expanding threatening to devastate the winter wheat crop.

Even the region's deer population is being hard hit by drought-related disease.

And in Texas, severe drought is expected again this year and there's already not enough to meet the needs of residents and farmers.


There is drought now extending from the Carolinas to California, essentially coast to coast, from the Gulf to the Mississippi and Missouri river headwaters.  This year that drought extended into Canada.  How many years of this do you think we can handle before something gives?

Nature's Version of Waterboarding

Think of it as the difference between a refreshing drink of water and undergoing waterboarding.   We used to expect the former from nature but now, all too often, it's the latter.

Las Vegas is an object lesson.   The desert city is now forced to drain its essential freshwater from a distant corner of the state via a canal system.   Until nature shows up but then it's often in the form of deluge triggering flash floods.

The city, that averages 4.5 inches of rain annually, got hit with a 1.75 inch downpour that left parts of the city flooded, like this parking lot at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas:

The floods have hit various spots throughout the American southwest.   Yet this sort of urban flooding is now established world wide.   Many municipal storm sewer systems are not designed to handle the sort of rainfall patterns they're now experiencing.  Runoff becomes concentrated and backs up, resulting in heavy flooding.   From Britain to the Philippines to China to the United States and elsewhere, heavy flooding is becoming commonplace.

Many of these areas are also beset by sustained drought that can harden the ground and make it impervious.   Then, when floodwaters arrive, they don't seep into the ground but simply run off into what the Mexicans call arroyos, normally empty streambeds carved out by centuries of flash flooding.

Today's floods, just like today's droughts, evidence our broken hydrological cycle.   Surface temperatures warm, increasing evaporation.   Atmospheric temperatures warm, increasing volumes of water vapour, itself a powerful greenhouse gas.   Warmer, wetter conditions create more atmospheric energy that results in erratic precipitation patterns and severe storm events of increasing frequency and intensity.   Some regions get hit by torrential rains, others are bypassed and experience drought.

This is occuring this year in most of the world's greatest grain producing countries - the United States, Australia and Russia in particular.   Food prices globally are already spiking.  A continuation of this threat will destabilize already wobbly countries around the world.

Predictable, reliable and moderate rainfall has been a vital part of mankind's introduction of agriculture that, in turn, facilitated the rise of civilization.   With but a few exceptions, farmers could count on receiving the right amounts of rainfall at the right times throughout the planting/growing/harvest cycle.   Too much rain or too little rain at any stage and the crop might fail.

Despite demographic predictions that the world population will reach 9-billion by 2050, perhaps 15-billion by 2100, the hydrological cycle problem could make those projections unrealistic.  At 7-billion, mankind's ecological footprint is already placing us in a severe "overshoot" deficit.   World Overshoot Day this year fell on August 22nd, several weeks earlier than just a few years ago.  In effect, mankind now uses a full year's worth of the Earth's renewable resources before the end of August, leaving us to "eat our seed corn" for the balance of the year.   This deficit is only going to be worsened by disruptions in agricultural production from droughts and floods.

We are being overtaken by events.   The theme of Gwynne Dyer's latest column could be "nobody saw it coming."  But it's here and we're going to have to find ways to live with it - better systems to collect and hold rainwater, curbs to water usage and wastage, improved agriculture and food distribution, for starters.   We're also going to have to realistically price carbon to whatever extent necessary to decarbonize our economies and our societies.  Above all else we'll need to develop technologies to strip atmospheric carbon in massive amounts.

For mankind this is likely the fight of our lives.   Yet that is still a far cry better than having to fight for our lives.

Drought - America Isn't Alone

Russian wheatfield ravaged by locusts and drought

Another giant grain exporter, Russia, is also being hammered by drought leaving Brits fearful of major food price increases.

Farmers in Russia are being crippled by severe drought, which has caused a potentially devastating drop in the country's grain production.
Fears are mounting that the country, which exports the cheapest wheat, will impose an export ban, pushing up the price of food globally.
Russia is forecast to produce 75million tons of grain this year – a 30 per cent drop in the country’s usual yield.

Jack Watts, senior analyst at HGCA the Home-Grown Cereals Authority, said: ‘If there is a longer term period of higher prices then this may well end up with higher food prices.’ 

Speaking to Radio 4’s Farming Today programme today, he said: ‘Two years ago Russia had a blanket export ban in place very quickly.
‘In 2012 the market is very fearful of this happening, there is no confirmation or real denial an export ban is going to happen, but the market is nervous based on a repeat of what we saw in 2010.’
The former Soviet Union is one of the world's biggest producers of wheat, barley  and rye.

America's Latest Drought Victim - the Mighty Mississippi

America's drought has forced traffic closures on the Mississippi River in Wisconsin and Arkansas and in Mississippi it's not even knee deep in places.

"It looks like a coastline out there," said Reynold Minsky, president of the 5th Louisiana Levee District board. "There are more beaches on the river than there are in Florida." 

The story is repeated along the length of the river.

 The Mississippi river is drying up and some shipping companies are worried that the drought of 1988 may be repeated, a time when the river dried up so much that barge traffic came to a standstill. In 1988 the shipping industry lost $1 billion, a number that would be far higher in 2012 and could be reached in as little as three days.

Almost all of the rivers 2,500 miles are experiencing some type of low water level. Just outside of Memphis the river is 13 feet below normal depth while the National Weather Service says Vicksburg, Mississippi is 20 feet below normal levels. Overall the Mississippi is 13 feet below normal averages for this time of year.

The drying up river is forcing barge, tugboat and towboat operators to navigate narrower and more shallow spots in the river, slowing their speeds as they pass dangerously close to one another. 

In some parts of the Mississippi the river is so narrow that one-way traffic is being utilized.

Because of the shallow water levels shippers have been forced to load less cargo which has left them with lower profit margins over fears that they would run into the rivers floor with heavier freight.

Industry analysts predict that closing down the Mississippi will cause losses up to $300 million per day and then grow exponentially over subsequent shutdown days. An idle tugboat alone costs nearly $10,000 to operate daily.

The Army Corps of Engineers is employing dredges to keep channels open to navigation.

 

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul - Vegas Style

From the "how f__king stupid can they get?" file.  Las Vegas is fast running out of water.   The city fears it may not even have drinking water next year.  Its reservoir, Lake Mead, is already at dangerously low levels.

So, what to do?  The answer is to pump massive volumes of water from distant parts of Nevada across three hundred miles of desert to Las Vegas.

Environmental groups, cattle ranchers and native groups from eastern Nevada have joined forces to oppose the decision.  They maintain there is no unappropriated water available in the targeted areas.

Bizarre as this may seem, this will not be the last time we'll see this sort of predicament occur in the drought-stricken US southwest.  This is a long odds gamble that the drought will end and surface water will be restored in time to avert collapse.  What is the alternative, shutting down Las Vegas?