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Category: drought
New Drought Study Is Huge. Media Yawns. Why?
Pretty much anything you can think of is being worsened by global warming. We know this because there are studies about such things that get well reported in the media. That’s how I know that climate change is affecting football, chocolate, wine, allergies, food prices, summer, wildfires, storms, and drought. (Obviously, this is not a comprehensive list.) That last one–drought–has received a lot of press, and as regular readers know, is a long-time interest of mine.
So it’s no surprise that I find this new study in Nature fascinating. As reported in Science News, the researchers seem to have discovered that “the standard method of assessing drought has exaggerated drying trends over the past 60 years.” What is a surprise (to me, anyway) is that mainstream media has thus far ignored this major study. That’s perplexing, especially since there is a global warming context (see RPJ’s post). As science journalist John Fleck tweeted:
I wonder how much news coverage we’d see of a paper saying global drought trends were *worse* than we thought: http://bit.ly/UpVfte
Indeed, other than a few other science outlets, such as the websites of Science magazine and New Scientist, there’s hardly any coverage–and none by the wire services, which is really surprising. Perhaps they and others will catch up. Meanwhile, I think Fleck has it right at his blog:
Some Good News Today on Climate Change: Less Drought than we thought
Come to think of it, maybe that’s why no environmental reporters have picked up on the story.
When Opinion Leaders Don't Lead
In a New York Times op-ed, Charles Fishman writes:
We’re in the worst drought in the United States since the 1950s, and we’re wasting it.
Though the drought has devastated corn crops and disrupted commerce on the Mississippi River, it also represents an opportunity to tackle long-ignored water problems and to reimagine how we manage, use and even think about water.
One good way to tackle these “long-ignored water problems” is for thought leaders to discuss them on national television. (Thought leaders are scholars, scientists, and writers that have a large media presence and influence public debates and policy.) Since the drought is big news this summer, thought leaders have an opportunity to frame the conversation.
So when I learned (via twitter) that Jeff Sachs, the director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute had recently appeared on MSBC to discuss the drought, I was curious about what he had to say. Sachs, in case you weren’t aware, is the embodiment of a thought leader. From his bio:
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned professor of economics, leader in sustainable development, senior UN advisor, bestselling author, and syndicated columnist whose monthly newspaper columns appear in more than 80 countries. He has twice been named among Time Magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders.
Here’s the segment and opening exchange between the MSNBC anchor and Sachs:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Anchor: I guess my question is we talk about climate change and energy policy, sometimes in a vacuum, but now that there is a very tangible effect that it’s having or will have and will continue to have on economics, on our economic system and agribusiness, do you think there will be much of an impetus for our leaders to do something about this?
Sachs: Definitely the public is seeing what this climate change means. It’s not a theory. It’s not something about the distant future. It’s hitting the planet now and not only in the United States. I spent a lot of the recent months in Africa. Massive droughts in the horn of Africa, and in West Africa. We know that Beijing has had the worst floods in modern history because…it’s massive rainfall. Weather is being disturbed everywhere. I think all over the world people know something’s not right. The world is changing. Indeed it is. That’s what the science shows, but we have been so much in the grip of the oil lobby, which is one of the world’s most powerful lobbies, that it has turned off the debate on this for years and now people are seeing what’s going on. It’s reckless what we’ve been doing, just driving the world’s economy to disaster.
*****
So there you have it. A news segment on the deepening American drought is about climate change. Be sure to watch the whole thing, as Sachs goes on to reiterate that the oil lobby (and the Koch brothers) are the main reason why the world hasn’t acted on global warming.
There’s a number of reasons why we can’t seem to have a sophisticated conversation about climate change or about how to make society less vulnerable to severe drought. The polluted science communication environment is certainly one of them. And yes, ideologues and entrenched business interests are another. But let’s be honest: Influential thought leaders deserve a share of the blame.
Could We Survive a 30-year Drought?
If you had time to read only one scholarly paper on drought, I’d suggest this one (published in 2007) by Cook et al. It’s a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary overview that amply supports this assertion made in the first sentence of the abstract:
Severe drought is the greatest recurring natural disaster to strike North America.
The Cook et al paper reads like a forensic reconstruction of the past 1000 years, revealing
the occurrence of past “megadroughts” of unprecedented severity and duration, ones that have never been experienced by modern societies in North America. There is strong archaeological evidence for the destabilizing influence of these past droughts on advanced agricultural societies, examples that should resonate today given the increasing vulnerability of modern water-based systems to relatively short-term droughts.
Speaking of those short-term droughts, they happen to be much in the news right now. The top story in today’s print edition of the New York Times starts off:
Scorching heat and the worst drought in nearly a half-century are threatening to send food prices up, spooking consumers and leading to worries about global food costs.
Many other recent stories have referenced NOAA’s state of the climate report from last month (June), which included this sobering tidbit:
In 2012, about 56 percent of the contiguous U.S. was in moderate to extreme drought at the end of June. The last time drought was this extensive was in December 1956 when about 58 percent was in moderate to extreme drought.
At the same time, NOAA also reports:
While extensive, drought in 2012 has not been as severe or widespread, westwide, as it was in 2002-2005.
That brought back memories for me, when I was working on this archaeological story in the mid-2000s. It took me to a remote and magnificent part of Utah that I would periodically return to for the rest of the decade, reporting on additional facets of a controversy that grew out of the initial piece. (Here’s a reflective post that includes most of the links to those stories).
So for that first article, I’m interviewing two of the principal archaeologists–Kevin Jones and Duncan Metcalfe– at the main site in Utah’s Range Creek Canyon, when the conversation turns to drought. The context is Utah prehistory but the discussion also touches on the recent drought that had gripped parts of the Southwest, including Utah. At one point, Jones injects some perspective:
The drought that nearly brought this country to its knees in the 1930s wasn’t all that long.
The two archaeologists then remind me of the mega-droughts I referenced above. (Incidentally, the prehistoric Plains got nailed, too.) With that context in mind, Metcalfe wonders about modern day Utah and the United States. “Could we survive a thirty year drought?” he asks rhetorically. “Absolutely not. We don’t have that buffering capability in place.” [This is a reference to reservoirs and other means of water storage.]
Jones then muses:
Collectively, humans are very, very bad at planning for the future. We like to coast and think things are going to be the same as they are. It makes sense in terms of your own personal decision making to not always be preparing for disaster. But collectively we’re just as bad at it as we are as individuals.
Now before we go any further, let me add another wrinkle to this longer-term perspective on drought. For that, we go a 2009 paper by Woodhouse et al and this section:
Although these “warm” medieval droughts may be considered conservative analogues for future droughts, it is important to recognize that there are many reasons that the mid-12th century drought cannot be considered an exact analogue for future worst-case droughts. Besides anthropogenic warming, there have been a multitude of changes in land cover throughout the Southwest due to human activities since the late 19th century. Conversion of desert and grassland to cropland, grazing, fire suppression, introduction of invasive species, disturbances leading to soil erosion and blowing dust, and the development of urban areas have all likely had impacts on regional climate. No systematic studies on these land cover changes and their impacts on climate or drought have been undertaken, but these changes are another important reason that droughts of the past are unlikely to be an exact analogue for current and future droughts. In addition, from an impacts standpoint, droughts have a much broader range of impacts on human activities today than in the past because of today’s greater demands on limited water resources.
Fast forward to a post I wrote at the beginning of 2012 for the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, in which I contend that
we have yet to appreciate what science has already learned about climate change in the distant past, specifically (tree ring) evidence of devastating, prolonged droughts.
This history and the contemporary land use changes and settlement patterns that Woodhouse et al describe gives us much to chew on in the context of today’s drought. Here’s something else from that paper we might want to keep in mind:
As far as we know, there is no reason why droughts of the duration, severity, and spatial extent experienced in the medieval period could not occur in the future. Even without the anticipated increased warming in the 21st century, droughts of the magnitude of the medieval droughts would present enormous challenges to water management agencies. Worst-case droughts of the 20th century, unlike those of the paleo record, do not contain episodes of many consecutive decades without high [water] flows, so critical for refilling of reservoirs.
Could we survive a 30-year drought? Maybe it’s a question that should be part of today’s anxious conversation on drought.
Paying Attention to the History of Climate Change
One of the unfortunate consequences of the hyperbolic, circumscribed climate change discourse (It’s all hoax, No it’s not!) is that we don’t pay enough attention to the climate change that did happen in prehistory, specifically the mega-droughts that combined with other factors to cripple ancient empires.
These are complicated stories that are still being puzzled out by scientists, as I discuss in this longish piece at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media. But I think these stories and the evidence of prehistoric drought are becoming clear enough for us to draw lessons from. Have a read and let me know over there what you think.
UPDATE: Via John Fleck, I see there’s an important new study on medieval megadroughts that adds to a robust body of literature.
Oh, the Horror!
In north Texas, a resident blanches at the idea of major water restrictions kicking in because of the area’s drought:
In Garland, it’s a major concern for resident Charlotte Piercy, who has lived in her neighborhood for 56 years. Piercy already hates her grass looking brown because of the Winter, but she fears, come the spring, it won’t get green again.
“I would hate to see us go to that stage,” said Piercy. “The neighborhood would start looking like grasslands, like dried up prairie lands.”
John Fleck tweets:
Note: You live in a dried up prairie.
These Bristlecones Are Talking
And they have a message:
Researchers say they have found new evidence of prolonged drought in parts of the West, suggesting megadroughts are not the rarity Westerners would like them to be.
Of course, there is already ample evidence for Westerners not to think this, but c’mon, who remembers what they had for dinner on Tuesday, much less how much it rained 800 years ago?
Then there’s all this climate changey stuff that people keep bringing into the picture, and it’s just…well…I bet some of my buddies out West can feel the hard reckoning in their desert-bleached bones.
There is an upside, though: Archaeologists in 3100 AD are gonna be feasting on the ruins out there. And a thousand years from today, I bet they’ll also be scratching their heads over the same thing we wonder now about the Anasazi and Hohokam: WTF were these people thinking?
Look on the Bright Side
Drought by area impacted is worst ever–though majority of US still drought free
From the Dept of Silver Linings
Romm: Global Warming is the Only Correct Answer
Just for kicks, here’s my revisions to the opening paragraph in this Climate Progress post:
Another week, another New York Times article Joe Romm post on extreme weather that fails to stretches climate science to simplistically connect the dots to global warming for the public. The NYT Romm blew the Arizona wildfire story. They He blew the Dust Bowl story.
And now, “one of the most influential global-warming blogs on the Internet” (according to Time magazine) has blown the Southwestern drought story. As Romm has so often reminded us, the media is remiss when it doesn’t connect disasters such as Australian wildfires and Russian heat waves to global warming. (The same goes for Arab revolts.) So, predictably perturbed at this NYT story, Romm titles his post:
NY Times Asks Why “Horrible” U.S. Drought “Has Come on Extra Hot and extra Early.” Their Answer is…La Nina, Of Course!”
Well, actually, that’s what NOAA’s David Miskus says in the NYT story:
A strong La Niña shut off the southern pipeline of moisture.
And, as I pointed out yesterday, that’s also what Climate Central’s Andrew Freedman reported in his WaPo’s Capital Weather Gang blog:
The drought was caused in part by La Nina conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which altered the main storm track across North America, helping to steer storms across the northern tier, leaving southern areas desperate for rain. Although La Nina has waned, there are increasing signs that it may redevelop this fall or winter, according to the latest outlook from the Climate Prediction Center.
But if you absolutely, positively must mention global warming when discussing the Southwestern drought, Freedman shows us how to do it in a responsible fashion, in his next passage (my emphasis):
However, La Nina wasn’t the only force behind the drought, says [Marty] Hoerling, who leads a group of climate change attribution sleuths at NOAA. For now, though, the co-conspirators remain unknown. Although climate science research shows that droughts are likely to become more intense and more frequent in a warming world, particularly in the Southwestern US, observational evidence does not yet show clear trends in drought conditions in the U.S. to date.
Hoerling says his quick analysis led him to conclude that climate change has not played a major role in this event. “This is not a climate change drought by all indications,” he said, adding that this view does not in any way refute the fact that global warming is occurring, either.
Joe Romm, for all his blustery criticism of journalism, could take some pointers from an actual climate journalist like Freedman.
A Complex, Combustible Landscape
This nuanced statement by Tom Kenworthy, a former reporter, was spot on until the very end (my emphasis):
The reasons that the desert Southwest is having another extreme fire season are complex. They include decades of poor forestry and livestock grazing practices, misguided federal firefighting efforts that have prevented low-intensity fires in Ponderosa pine forests from clearing out underbrush and small trees, and prolonged, exceptional drought caused by climate change.
John Fleck, a science writer for the Albuquerque Journal, grasps the complexity of the fire story, and Andrew Freedman does a superb job unpacking the scorching Southwestern drought in a must-read post at the WaPo’s Capital Weather Gang blog:
The drought was caused in part by La Nina conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which altered the main storm track across North America, helping to steer storms across the northern tier, leaving southern areas desperate for rain. Although La Nina has waned, there are increasing signs that it may redevelop this fall or winter, according to the latest outlook from the Climate Prediction Center.
However, La Nina wasn’t the only force behind the drought, says [Marty] Hoerling, who leads a group of climate change attribution sleuths at NOAA. For now, though, the co-conspirators remain unknown. Although climate science research shows that droughts are likely to become more intense and more frequent in a warming world, particularly in the Southwestern US, observational evidence does not yet show clear trends in drought conditions in the U.S. to date.
Hoerling says his quick analysis led him to conclude that climate change has not played a major role in this event. “This is not a climate change drought by all indications,” he said, adding that this view does not in any way refute the fact that global warming is occurring, either.
Hoerling noted that as average temperatures increase due to climate change, drought impacts would likely get worse. Drought plus heat “is just going to make a bad situation that much worse,” he said, since higher temperatures dry soils out much more rapidly. “We haven’t necessarily dealt with drought and heat at the same time in such a persistent way.”
He said the drought serves as a reminder that society needs to be more prepared for significant, relatively rare events such as this one, regardless of whether they are due to global warming or natural climate variability.
Mega-Droughts Stalk the Southwest
A few weeks ago, I mused that the American Southwest may be on borrowed time. Forget that.
The Southwest is toast.
A new paper in Nature spells doom. From the abstract:
The potential for increased drought frequency and severity linked to anthropogenic climate change in the semi-arid regions of the southwestern United States is a serious concern. Multi-year droughts during the instrumental period and decadal-length droughts of the past two millennia were shorter and climatically different from the future permanent, “˜dust-bowl-like’ megadrought conditions, lasting decades to a century, that are predicted as a consequence of warming.
Nature’s Quirin Schiermeier has an article on the study, and this eye-popping quote from Richard Seager, a Columbia University climate researcher:
The drying we expect for the twenty-first century is entirely the result of increased greenhouse forcing.
But we’re not there yet, Seager tells Nature:
A signal of anthropogenic drying is emerging, but it is still small. I’d expect that by mid-century the human signal will exceed the amplitude of natural climate variability. Then we can safely say that the Southwest has entered a new climate stage.
UPDATE: Prehistoric drought in the SW is a big interest of mine, so I’m going to provide all the relevant press coverage links, as they come in. John Fleck, a science writer for The Albuquerque Journal, has a story and a post at his blog.
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