Blistering heat, stronger storms, droughts, floods and fires are putting food production at risk.
Sriracha fans are a passionate bunch. They have been known to get tattoos of the popular hot sauce on their bodies and dress up like the red plastic squeeze bottle for Halloween.
So it’s no surprise that an unprecedented shortage of the beloved condiment would send loyalists scrambling to avoid a spiceless summer.
Huy Fong Foods, the southern California company that produces 20m bottles of sriracha annually, has experienced a low inventory of red jalapeño chilli peppers in recent years made worse by spring’s crop failure.
The cause? Severe weather and drought conditions in Mexico.
It’s not just chilli peppers. Mustard producers in France and Canada said extreme weather caused a 50% reduction in seed production last year, leading to a shortage of the condiment on grocery store shelves. Blistering heat, stronger storms, droughts, floods, fires and changes in rainfall patterns are also affecting the cost and availability of staples, including wheat, corn, coffee, apples, chocolate and wine. The climate crisis is increasing the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events – and it’s putting food production at risk.
“Almost everything we grow and raise in the US is facing some climatic stress,” said Carolyn Dimitri, nutrition and food studies professor at NYU.
Wheat and other grain crops are particularly vulnerable. In the Great Plains, where most of the US’s wheat is harvested, drought depressed the winter crop. Abandonment levels for winter wheat in the US – primarily in Texas and Oklahoma – are the highest since 2002. Meanwhile in Montana, flooding is threatening grain crops.
“This becomes important because the US doesn’t have a large surplus and can’t really contribute at this exact minute to fill in the global gap in wheat supplies due to the Ukraine crisis,” said Dimitri.
The impact of the climate crisis on grain crops extends beyond the US. In India, a fierce heatwave damaged the wheat crop due to record-setting temperatures throughout the spring and summer. As Delhi hit 120F in May, the government placed a ban on wheat exports, driving up prices even further than the rise following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Climate change could seriously affect the global production of maize and wheat as early as 2030, a 2021 Nasa study found, with maize crop yields estimated to decline by 24%.
Apples are another food already at risk. Last year’s apple harvest in Michigan and Wisconsin was compromised because of heavy frost in the spring. According to the USDA, changes in climate, such as warming, can lead to smaller yields, lower growth and changes in the fruit’s quality.
“Humans are scrappy little creatures so we’re still growing food and yields are going up by and large, but as the temperature goes up, the challenge becomes greater,” said Ricky Robertson, a senior researcher at International Food Policy Research Institute.
Extreme weather is affecting the cost of coffee. Between April 2020 and December 2021, coffee prices increased 70% after droughts and frost destroyed crops in Brazil, the world’s largest coffee-producing country. The economic ramifications could be profound, since it’s estimated that as many as 120 million of the world’s poorest depend on coffee production for their survival.
John Furlow, director of the Columbia Climate School’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), said coffee farmers in places like Costa Rica and Jamaica can’t just move to higher elevations in response to warming temperatures.
“Think of a mountain as a cone,” said Furlow. “As you move up there’s less area, so that’s a risk.”
The climate crisis will also change where farmers can grow cacao and a shortage of chocolate products is expected in the coming years due to drier weather in west Africa.
Last year, France’s wine industry saw its smallest harvest since 1957, with an estimated loss of $2bn in sales. One Champagne vineyard that typically makes 40,000 to 50,000 bottles annually produced nothing in 2021 due to higher temperatures and heavy rains.
One study showed that if temperatures rise by 2C, wine-growing regions could shrink by as much as 56%. Four degrees of warming could mean 85% of those areas would no longer be able to produce good wines.
“This means that growers are having to increase irrigation – a soon-to-be non-viable adaptation strategy – migrate or cease production entirely,” said Linda Johnson-Bell, founder of the Wine and Climate Change Institute.
“Climate change and its erratic weather patterns will change the world’s wine map. Regions will disappear and others will emerge.”
California’s record-setting wildfires in 2020 severely affected harvest and the hazardous air quality threatened large portions of the state’s wine grape crop. Napa Valley winemakers are being forced to take extreme action, such as spraying sunscreen on grapes and irrigating with treated wastewater from toilets and sinks, in order to survive – and some vineyards won’t.
Robertson likens agriculture’s climate-related challenges to a game of musical chairs, with growers having to move their production in order to adapt to warmer temperatures and extreme weather.
“You’re going to have to work harder and find more land to grow,” he said. “The places that become less good for growing stuff are greater than the new places they can go. The small producers especially are going to face difficulty in trying to figure out where they are in the musical chairs.”
Food production is a driver of the climate crisis and a victim of it. Transforming the food system will require a slew of actions, including increasing crop diversity, delivering climate predictions to farmers around the world, expanding conservation programs and offering growers insurance that pays out when an index such as rain or wind speed falls above or below a set threshold.
The Biden administration is supporting research into “climate-smart” agriculture, an approach to managing cropland, forest, fisheries and livestock that attempts to address the intersecting challenges of the climate crisis and food security.
In May, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said that climate-related disasters and extreme weather were a driver of global hunger and that 1.7 billion people have been affected by the climate crisis over the last decade.
Experts say unless action is taken, we can expect to see increased food prices, decreased availability and conflict over water, which will primarily affect poorer countries and low-income Americans, straining everything from school lunches to food aid programs.
“We’re suffering in the US because we can’t get sriracha,” said Furlow. “The farmers who produce those peppers are not getting that income – that’s a little bit worse than having a bland sandwich.”
This story was originally published in The Guardian and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now‘s , ‘Food & Water’ coverage week.
Probably, you’re hot right now. Or soaked. Or in the dark. Or frightened. Or all of the above. Phrases like “ring of fire” have entered the weather lexicon beside “heat dome,” “polar vortex,” “atmospheric river” and “bombogenesis” (also known as a “bomb cyclone,” because that isn’t terrifying or anything) to try and explain the bedlam weather affecting basically every one of the contiguous 48 states.
That’s cool, I guess; I’ve always been a Johnny Cash fan, and I love the Social Distortion cover. It requires electricity to hear them, though, and for about 500,000 people in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois, that’s not an option at present. The power is out for the foreseeable future. There was a tornado warning during rush hour in Chicago, and wind speeds were clocked over 80 miles per hour as storms swept the region. One storm near Fort Wayne was almost 70,000 feet tall.
“The heat dome is centered near Nashville,” reportsThe Washington Post. “It has established dozens of high temperature records since it first formed late last week over Texas and the Southwest. Temperatures soared to as high as 123 degrees in Death Valley, Calif., while Phoenix hit 114 and Las Vegas 109 over the weekend.”
Meanwhile, the Post adds, many cities set high-temperature records on Monday:
Austin and San Antonio made it to 105…. Lincoln, Neb. (with a high of 103 degrees), Columbia, S.C. (103), Austin (102), St. Louis (100), Charlotte (98), Nashville (97), and Louisville and Paducah, Ky. (both 97) set June 13 records Monday. North Platte, Neb., hit 108 degrees — not just a daily record, but the highest temperature ever recorded there during the month of June.
Yellowstone National Park is closed because large parts of it are flooding and eating houses. Roads through the park have been obliterated, bridges have collapsed, with mud and rockslides battering what’s left. Park visitors have been ordered to evacuate, but there is no accounting for how many may be trapped in the back country. All entrances have been closed.
“The US Geological Survey on Monday said the Yellowstone River at Corwin Springs stage increased by about 6 feet in the past 24 hours,” reportsAxios, “which is above the National Weather Service’s flood stage. In fact, it rose to an unprecedented level, over 2 feet higher than its previous all-time record flood in 1918, according to the NWS.”
According to The New York Times, the weather-related battering has cashiered a significant portion of the park for the remainder of the tourist season, with no expectation of change in sight:
“Devastating rain and mudslides that tore out bridges, flooded homes and forced some 10,000 people to evacuate will keep the northern reaches of Yellowstone National Park, one of the nation’s most-visited natural wonders, cut off to tourists for the rest of the busy summer travel season. And officials warned that more rain and flooding could be on the way.”
And then there are the fires, massive ones, again, now spread over six different states. In this, the contiguous 48 do not stand alone; Alaska is currently enduring 23 significant infernos. In places like Arizona, California and New Mexico, the fires are being fueled by the aforementioned record-setting heat that has exacerbated an ongoing multistate drought of historic proportions.
The existential question of water availability is officially pressing, and no longer merely relegated to the someday-maybe corner. Towns in multiple states are running out of water, and Lake Mead in Colorado — the once-massive reservoir providing water to some 20 million people — has almost ceased to exist. In Utah, the Great Salt Lake is drying up, setting the stage for clouds of arsenic dust to blow in the wind from the dry lake bed.
Chalk it up to anthropogenic (Read: we did this to ourselves) climate disruption, the monster that was under the bed for years before it finally blasted through the mattress and took over the room. The evidence of human-made climate change is now so brazenly obvious that the denial camp has moved from “It’s not real” to “It can’t be fixed,” marking another milestone in their eternal quest to be not one bit helpful in salvaging the situation if there’s still a buck to be made from fossil fuels.
Here’s how it works for much of the west: Drought leads to lower and occasionally nonexistent snowfall in the mountains. That accumulated snowfall, back when it happened, would melt as the season warmed and feed water to the various states. Now, the absence of snow leads to parched summers. When there is snow, the extreme heat causes it to melt too quickly, leading to flooding calamities like the one currently lashing Yellowstone.
“Suffice it to say,” climate reporter Dahr Jamail wrote in Truthout in July of 2019, “all of us now, if we live long enough, are likely to become climate refugees at some point … whether it be from lack of food and water, rising seas, wildfires, smoke, or extreme weather events. For many, their time as climate refugees has already begun.”
The future is now, and it is hot, thirsty, windy and dangerous. This truth is baked into tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow again. It will not get better. How much worse it gets depends, in an ever decreasing measure, upon us.
The US Senate approved £40bn in aid to Ukraine on Thursday 19th May. The Financial Times say this will be “military, economic and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine.” It is not clear how much of this money will end up in the hands of arms firms. Meanwhile in Somalia, where famine linked to the Ukraine war threatens, a new US troop deployment has been announced. Poorer countries in the Global South are once again suffering from an inequitable global system.
The Squad, the group of left-leaning Congresswomen, including Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, all voted in favour of the $40bn package. As did former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, all while US citizens undergo their own daily struggles:
Bernie & The Squad voting for another $40 Billion to Ukraine is shameful. We should not be spending $100 million dollars a day on a proxy war when Americans continue being evicted, killed by lack of healthcare, and made to work 2-3 jobs.
Business Insider even provided a list of which American politicians stand to profit directly from the new package, given their interests in arms firms.
Somalia and Ukraine
Somalia is currently threatened with famine. As The Canary reported recently the risk is heightened by the war in Ukraine. A lot of the grain bought up by NGOs and used for aid comes from Ukraine and the war has hit agriculture.
As $40bn has been allocated for arms to Ukraine, the US has opted for a militarised approach in Somalia too. 500 troops will be sent to train and advise local forces. Donald Trump cancelled a similar mission in 2020. Joe Biden has now approved a renewal, reportedly to help pin back Al-Shabaab, a group affiliated to Al Qaeda among others.
With a new US favourite, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, just elected as president in Somalia, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has extended an aid package to the country. As ever with the IMF, this is on condition of reforms, not least in the private sector.
Oil rush?
How (or if) the military deployment bears on recent oil exploration in Somalia is not yet clear. But the previous president declared a deal with a US oil firm null and void hours after it was agreed earlier in 2022. The Prime Minister agreed that because the deal was struck during an election period, it was illegal.
The firm itself, Coastline Exploration, was investigated for corruption. Although based in Texas, Coastline was chaired by a Tory peer and former party leader Michael Howard. Prior to the deal’s collapse, Coastline was known as Soma Oil and sought to exploit Somalia’s energy resources, which many consider one of the industry’s last great frontiers.
It remains to be seen if soaring oil prices accelerate new exploration deals for Somali oil. As it stands oil giants, like arms giants, have seen their profits spike massively as a result of the war in Ukraine.
Unequal
Somalis live in the shadow of oil firms, arms corporations, and the West’s conflicts. Their new president has promised an era of peace. But this is a country where 70% live on less than two dollars a day. Hunger and insurgent violence are a daily reality. And lives can hinge on decisions made by great powers and indifferent corporations. The US deployment mission will come under the command of Africom, an organisation which pursues US interests on the continent. The motivations of the US remain to be seen, but it’s clear that the potential for destabilisation due to foreign interference is a real possibility for Somalia.
The climate crisis is making droughts more frequent and longer-lasting, a new UN report has announced.
The report, Drought in Numbers, 2022, was released Wednesday in honor of Drought Day at the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)’s 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) taking place in Abijan, Côte d’Ivoire from May 9 to 20.
“The facts and figures of this publication all point in the same direction: an upward trajectory in the duration of droughts and the severity of impacts, not only affecting human societies but also the ecological systems upon which the survival of all life depends, including that of our own species.” UNCCD Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw said in a press release.
The planet is wheezing, coughing and sputtering because of vicious attacks by worldwide droughts aided and abetted by global warming at only 1.2C above baseline. Some major metropolises are rationing water.
What’ll happen at 1.5C?
It’s not as if droughts are not a normal feature of the climate system. They are, but the problem nowadays is highlighted by reports from NASA and NOAA stating that earth is trapping nearly twice as much heat is it did in 2005 described as an “unprecedented increase amid the climate crisis.” This trend is described as “quite alarming.”
The planet trapping heat at double the rate of only 17 years ago is off-the-charts bad news and reason enough for the world’s leaders to go all-in on global warming preventive measures, and then hope and pray that it’s not too late.
Throughout Earth’s history drought has been a normal feature of climate change, but that’s the past. Droughts are no longer normal features. They are much, much more severe and longer lasting, for example, America’s drought in the West is ongoing for 20 years, the worst in 1,200 years, and it’s taken Lake Mead water levels down to 1937 when it first started filling up.
On a worldwide basis, drought’s impact on water reservoirs on every continent is chilling. Agricultural yields are suffering.
Undoubtedly, the utter failure by the world’s political leaders to respect 30-50 years of public warnings by scientists to “get off fossil fuels ASAP” is coming home to roost. When will the general public fight back and throw out climate change denial politicians along with their motley shrilly charlatans?
Along those lines, in an historic judgment, a Belgian court ruled that Belgium’s climate failures violate human rights, stating that public authorities broke promises to tackle the climate issue. 58,000 citizens served as co-plaintiffs in the case. To wit: “By not taking all ‘necessary measures’ to prevent the ‘detrimental’ effects of climate change, the court said, Belgian authorities had breached the right to life (Article 2) and the right to respect for private and family life (Article 8).”1
A major study of soil moisture drought in Europe during the period from 1766 to 2020 led to the conclusion that recent drought events brought the “most intense drought conditions for Europe in 250 years: “We conclude that Europe should prepare adaptation and mitigation plans for future events whose intensity may be comparable to the previous event, but whose duration (and partly their spatial extent) will be much greater than any event observed in the last 250 years.” 2
An international team, led by the University of Cambridge… found that after a long-term drying trend, European drought conditions since 2015 suddenly intensified, beyond anything in the past two thousand (2,000) years.
Eastern Europe is feeling the impact of serious drought. A report from the Atlantic Council in 2021 “emphasized the impacts of drought on Ukraine’s grain exports, noting that they had ‘fallen sharply year-on-year during the current season due to smaller harvests caused by severe drought conditions.’ When an agricultural power as important as Ukraine suddenly starts producing and exporting much less food, it is a recipe for social dislocation, human suffering, and political unrest, both inside the country and beyond.” 3
According to the European Commission: “A severe drought has been affecting northern Italy and the Po River basin in particular.” 4 In Northern Italy, most of the reservoirs are below the minimum historical values… stored energy as of March 2022 is 27.5% less than the 8-year minimum. Both agricultural yield and costs for power are negatively impacted. That -27.5% is 27.5% below the 8-yr minimum!
In the US, according to the Palmer Drought index, severe-to-extreme drought is affecting 38% of the contiguous US as of March 2022. That’s almost as bad as it ever gets. More than 50% of the country registers as moderate-to-extreme. As a result, the US Bureau of Reclamation is scrambling to retain/add/cheat/steal enough water for America’s two largest reservoirs Lake Powell and Lake Mead to keep hydropower supplying electrical power to 5M and water to 40M. Rationing to some of seven SW states has already started. Is that the eye-opener of all eye-openers? Answer: Yes.
Historic drought has literally changed the landscape in parts of South America: “Until 2020, there was plenty of water, swamps, stagnant lakes and lagoons in Argentina’s Ibera Wetlands, one of the largest such ecosystems in the world. But an historic drought of the Parana River dried much of it out; its waters are in the lowest level since 1944. Since January it has been the stage of raging fires.” 5
Chile is experiencing such a horrendous record-breaking drought (13 years) that the capital city Santiago, population 6M, is rationing water. The city will experience rotating water cut-offs of up to 24 hours at a time in a four-tier alert system with public service announcements so residents can prepare for no water. “This is the first time in history that Santiago has a water rationing plan due to the severity of climate change, It’s important for citizens to understand that climate change is here to stay. It’s not just global, it’s local,” according to Claudio Orrego, governor of the Santiago metropolitan region.6
In SE Asia the Mekong River serves as the waterway for the livelihood of 65M people. This is the fourth year of drought. According to the Ministry of Water Resources river conditions are the worst in 60 years. For example, in Cambodia water capacity for crop irrigation is at only 20%. Upstream dams in China and Laos also negatively add to the impact of severe drought conditions.
In China the port city of Guangzhou (pop 15M) and Shenzhen (pop 12.5M), which links HK to mainland China, have put residents on notice to cut (reduce) water consumption between January and October of 2022, as the main water source, the East River (down 50%) experiences the most severe drought in decades.7
In Africa, a brutal drought in Ethiopia and Kenya has caused three million livestock dead and 30% of household herds have died in Somalia. According to the UN, the worsening drought in the Horn of Africa puts 20M people at risk. Rampant migration follows in the footsteps of severe drought, e.g., Central America’s Dry Corridor.
As nation/states fail to adequately address the global warming issue with Plan A, which is attacking the source, or cutting fossil fuel emissions, it becomes increasingly urgent to go to Plan B, which is adapting to the unforgiving climate system exhaust (cough-cough) of a failed Plan A.
In 2021, the Netherlands hosted the first-ever Climate Adaptation Summit (CAS 2021), highlighting adaptation measures as crucial for minimizing extreme weather events and improving water security.
The facts surrounding the current status of CO2 emissions (at all-time highs over the past millennium) and plans for expansion by the fossil fuel industry over the course of this decade; i.e., China and India building new coal plants like crazy and oil companies planning to spend billions for new oil and gas expansion, dictate that adaptation to an unpredictably challenging destructive climate system is an absolute necessity because global warming ain’t gonna get fixed.
It is noteworthy that Dr. James Hansen’s (Columbia University) most recent monthly temperature update states:
Note monthly temperature anomalies on land now commonly exceed +2°C (+3.6°F), with the Arctic anomaly often exceeding +5°C (+9°F).
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forewarned that +2°C is the upper limit where the climate system starts to get real crazy; however, at today’s overall planet temperature of +1.2°C above baseline trouble is already evident, e.g., the worst droughts in centuries found on every continent with some major cities either rationing water or suggesting voluntary cutbacks. And, oh yeah, food prices are just starting to skyrocket.
Frankly, human ingenuity must take over on local and regional bases to work towards “adaptation to a rambunctiously changing climate,” and, of course, lots of luck. Interestingly, some of America’s biggest western cities have learned to adapt to severe drought, as discussed in some detail in the article: 8
“Drought: The New Global Calamity?” The Kashmir Monitor, June 30, 2021.
“The 2018-2020 Multi-Year Drought Sets a New Benchmark in Europe”, American Geophysical Union, 15 March 2022.
“Extreme Drought Is Crashing Food Production Whether Russia Invades or Not”, The Nation, February. 17, 2022.
“Drought in Northern Italy”, March 2022: GDO Analytical Report, European Commission.
“Climate Change Brings Extreme, Early Impact to South America”, phys.org, March 1, 2022.
“Chile Announces Unprecedented Plan to Ration Water As Drought Enters 13th Year”, The Guardian, April 11, 2022.
“China’s Southern Megacities Warn of Water Shortages During East River Drought”, Reuters, December 8, 2021.
America’s western metropolises are thriving in the midst of the fiercest drought in over 1,000 years.
Not all climate change/global warming news is negative. Positive pushback to global warming is real and happening right under our collective noses.
Still, climate scientists wring their hands in despair over the failure of the corporate-controlled world to come to grips with climate change’s biggest bugaboo, which is too much fossil fuel emitting too much CO2 creating too much warmth that eventually brings on excessive heat. Ergo! Ecosystems fail! Droughts accelerate!
For decades now, scientists have been warning about the danger of too much fossil fuel causing climate system failure, like wet-bulb temperature-related deaths within 6 hrs. @ 95°F/90%H (India?), crop failures, rising sea levels, and scorching droughts. The broken promises of nation/states to “fix it” almost always turn to dust or result in too little, too late.
Yet, Hooray! Human ingenuity is alive and well. Adapting to record-setting drought in the United States is happening, especially in desert cities in America’s arid West, living proof that adaptation to a broken climate system is possible and likely for decades to come. The level of success is reason enough for some amount of cheer and good feelings. America’s western cities are taking on the worst drought in centuries and winning!
But, before looking behind the scenes of heroic efforts by some of America’s biggest cities, it is crucial to look at an all-points bulletin issued by the Bureau of Reclamation about critically low water levels at Lake Powell and at Lake Mead, which are responsible for hydroelectric power for millions and drinking water for 40M people in the West. Water levels at these two crucial reservoirs are dangerously low, calling for extreme measures years earlier than planned.
The Bureau had to pull off some gimmickry (hydrological accounting) for Lake Powell to continue providing hydroelectric power to millions of homes. Otherwise, the power was destined to end as water levels fall below intakes. Water levels at Lake Powell are at all-time lows. The Bureau of Reclamation, in order to keep both hydropower and drinking water for millions, had to employ gimmickry whilst “holding the hands” of seven (7) states that receive their water downstream from the Colorado River to Lake Powell and onto Lake Mead, which is also at all-time record lows going back to 1937 when Lake Mead first started filling up. This is heartbreaking evidence of the devastating drought throughout the West, which refuses to let up.
The Bureau’s gimmickry includes plans for Lake Mead to give up some water intake from Lake Powell to keep the hydropower on for millions of homes. The Bureau, in turn, is robbing water (162B gallons) from a recreational reservoir, Flaming Gorge Reservoir (Wyoming and Utah), to be sent to Lake Powell. This somewhat complicated transaction keeps the lights on for millions, although, Lake Mead loses 480,000 acre-feet of water that Lake Powell normally sends its way. In the end, it’s hoped that spring snow runoff will compensate for the loss to Lake Mead.
The maneuvers by the Bureau include contingency plans that trigger mandatory water reductions for western states such as Arizona (-30%). As a result, farmers in the Phoenix area will have to fallow cotton and alfalfa fields. Most importantly, the accounting gimmick will allow the Bureau to avoid declaring a Tier 2b shortage as it artificially assumes (cooking the books) that Lake Mead did receive water from Lake Powell that it did not receive. As it happens, the Western states are already at Tier 1 shortages whereas a Tier 2b shortage would involve draconian cuts.
The short take on this convoluted affair is that America’s West is running out of adequate water supply in large measure because of an unrelenting drought that has all of the characteristics of a mega-drought. A megadrought is defined as a period of extreme dryness that lasts for decades. During a megadrought wet years do appear but quickly return to severe dryness. The current drought in America’s West has lasted for 20 years.
Along the way the big metropolitan regions have learned how to capitalize on those intermittent wet years in addition to smart measures to conserve and create more potable water. In remarkable fashion, they have learned to cope and are fighting back against the worst drought in recorded history, building adequate supplies of water, and in some cases, more than enough water, as the world surrounding these megalopolises containing millions of people turns brutally dangerously hot and dry. This exemplifies human initiative and ingenuity at work, and it promises to extend quality life in the desert West beyond the challenges of the worst drought in 1,200 years. It is something to behold.
San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque in the face of the worst drought since William the Conquer (1028-1087) hit the shores of England are already working around the issue of federal cuts in Colorado River water, the first cuts in history.
The San Diego Water Authority recently did a water supply stress test that showed it is “water good” until 2045, and probably beyond. Similar results are happening in Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Albuquerque, all nestled within a drought apocalypse, but managing to create adequate supply of water to continue growing into the surrounding desert countryside. It’s a miracle of ingenuity, foresight, and dedication. It’s all about sourcing and conserving water.
YaleEnvironment360, an indispensible source for best coverage of the environment, recently published an article by Jim Robbins: “A Quiet Revolution: Southwest Cities Learn to Thrive Amid Drought”, YaleEnvironment360, April 24, 2022, stating: “From replacing water-guzzling lawns with native vegetation, to low-flow plumbing fixtures, to water recycling and desalination, to the shift of agricultural water to cities, governments in arid western regions are pursuing an all-of-the-above strategy.”
The upshot is that water conservation is one of the keys to successfully encountering droughts. For example, San Diego water usage dropped from 81.5 billion gallons in 2007 to 57 billion gallons in 2020 because of conservation measures.
Moreover, nine (9) desert cities in the Colorado River Basin complex lowered water demand by 19% to 48% from years 2000 to 2015. These are testimonials to the value of conservation measures.
According to YaleEnvironment360:
San Diego has pursued a multi-pronged approach. The city now requires an array of water-saving technology in new homes, such as low-flow toilets and showerheads. Perhaps the single biggest piece of the conservation solution is paying homeowners to tear out yards full of Kentucky bluegrass and replace them with far more water-efficient landscaping. The city-run program pays up to $4 a square foot for as much as 5,000 square feet, and so far has replaced 42 million square feet of water-thirsty lawns.
Per capital water usage for the San Diego County Water Authority has dropped from 235 gallons per day per capita in 1990 to 135 gallons per day now. That is an impressive change. Furthermore, the city captures 90% of rainwater runoff for additional supply to 24 reservoirs where it is treated to drinking water standards.
Oceanside, California, near San Diego, just opened a “toilet to tap” recycling facility that creates 3 million gallons per day or 20% of the city needs. Similarly, San Diego is working on a project for 40% of city water needs by recycling “toilet to tap.” San Diego is also home to North America’s largest desalination plant.
The metropolis of Phoenix took the number of single-family homes with lush landscaping from 80% in the 1970s down to 10% in 2022 as desert heat-tolerant plants replaced water-guzzling grass.
Los Angeles is beating the drought challenge with heavy investments in water storage, rainwater capture and reclamation with a goal of self-sufficiency of 70% of city water needs from local sources by 2035. LA mayor Eric Garcetti claims: “We’re going to have plenty of water.” 1 According to Felicia Marcus, former chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board, who is now a visiting fellow at Stanford University: “The LA area is going to be the epicenter of climate adaptation in urban water in the world. ”2
Work is already underway in LA with massive upgrades to wastewater treatment plants for potable water, spending $4.3B for the city’s Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant. LA will source 35% of the city’s water from recycling versus 2% today. Additionally, some of the world’s largest groundwater treatment facilities are under construction in the San Fernando Valley.
LA is currently expanding catch basins and inlets that recharge aquifers, and it is planning to double rainwater capture capacity over the next 15 years. That’s water that previously flowed directly into the ocean.
Conservation measures for LA started in the 1970s. Today, LA uses less water per capita than it did 50 years ago despite a population increase of one million. Water usage per capita has declined by more than 40%.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has a record 3.2 million acre feet of water in reservoirs, thanks to the foresight to overbuild storage reservoirs combined with conservation measures, all the while working against the impact of the worst drought in over 1,000 years.
The state of California is moving to small-scale recycling. For example, in San Francisco, every commercial building over 100,000 sq. ft. has to use on-site recycling systems. Additionally, home water recycling units are coming soon, prompting some water aficionados to speculate that water utilities could end up with stranded assets or extra capacity.
Optimism about future stable growth in America’s West is directly tied to adapting to the rigors of a megadrought: “We know it’s a desert and we plan accordingly,’ said Arizona’s Kathryn Sorenson (Kyl Center for Water Policy). ‘Phoenix can survive dead pool’ — the term for a nearly empty Lake Mead — for generations. We have groundwater; we have done a good job of conservation and diversifying our portfolios. Desert cities are the oldest cities, and we will withstand the test of time.” 3
Eckhouse and Bliss, “Los Angeles Is Building a Future Where Water Won’t Run Out”, Bloomberg, January 31, 2022.
Mexico is heading into the worst months of its dry season. Fifteen of 32 states are experiencing extremely high stress on water resources, as use surpasses the amount available.
Water rights activists use the term “Day Zero” for the date when a region will lack sufficient water to meet basic needs. Much of Mexico is close to this point, with Monterrey and Nuevo Leon only having two months of water reserves, and Mexico City two years. For comparison’s sake, England has been described as being in the “jaws of death” because its Day Zero is 25 years away.
Activists with the Indigenous Caravan for Water and Life argue that it is multinational corporations, often with governmental support, that are responsible for causing climate change, environmental damage and water shortages — rather than the regular dry season.
“It’s not a drought, it’s looting” has been one of the main chants of the month-long caravan which kicked off in Puebla on March 22, and will run until April 24.
The caravan, one of the biggest demonstrations in recent years of Indigenous people’s defense of the environment, will cover nine states and visit Indigenous communities across Mexico each day for 34 days. These communities are standing up for their environmental rights and autonomy. Most are confronting megaprojects, where manufacturing, mining, extractive and commercial companies — often from the U.S. or Europe – have built massive amounts of infrastructure, such as hydroelectric plants and gas pipelines, to plunder the communities of their water and energy resources.
In Puebla state alone, hundreds of corporations have licenses to build or maintain such infrastructure, which many local residents refer to as “death projects” because they threaten the existence of nearby communities. The hydroelectric plants that are built to provide mines with energy deprive nearby farmers of water. There are fracking zones and gas pipelines, and most supportive infrastructure is also privately owned, with corporate interests at heart and no community consultation. Areas with the highest concentration of such projects, such as Serdán and northern Puebla state, also have the highest levels of organized crime.
Mexico has the highest amount of carbon emissions from electricity of any country in Latin America. In Cuautlancingo, Puebla, for example, where Volkswagen and the industrial park, Finsa, is located, at least 80 percent of electricity use is industrial. Companies like Volkswagen, Ternium, Heineken and Dr. Pepper are also among the main users of water in Puebla state.
Indigenous people are participating in a month-long caravan, traveling around the country and marching and meeting in multiple towns and cities a day, in order to denounce environmental destruction by transnationals.Tamara PearsonRepresentative of the National Indigenous Council, Marichuy.Tamara PearsonA meeting of local communities and the caravan in Ahuacatlán on March 26.Tamara Pearson
These mega projects disproportionately affect Indigenous people, said María de Jesús Patricio, widely known as Marichuy, who is a spokesperson for the National Indigenous Council (CNI) and the first female Indigenous presidential hopeful in the country.
From the way Indigenous people farm, to the deterioration of their lands, to the stealing and contamination of their water, the mega projects affect “what they eat, and therefore their health. They are modifying the environment, polluting the … rivers, and modifying farming cycles. And they cause internal divisions in the communities, by winning over some members with donations and telling them that the mega projects will bring employment,” Marichuy told Truthout from a bus during the caravan.
Mega projects also often involve displacing entire Indigenous communities, and the loss of important natural, cultural or religious sites. Across Mexico, some 4,200 dam construction projects have forced 185,000 people, mostly poor or original peoples, to leave their homes.
The violence against the land is reflected in the violence against people defending it. Last year, 25 such activists were murdered, with 238 total violent attacks recorded — making it the most violent year since 2014, when the Mexican Center for Environmental Rights (CEMDA) began keeping a tally.
Uniting Isolated Struggles
The caravan around Mexico is showing people that “our problems are similar … communities are seeking ways to walk together and denounce all the different types of plundering,” Marichuy said.
For the launch, the caravan held a press conference and marched outside Bonafont, a water bottling plant that is owned by Danone. Local Nahua peoples had taken over the plant last year, but were evicted by the military in February.
The bottling plant is now guarded by security forces in full battle gear, with a wall of 20-liter water bottles and two steel fences to prevent Indigenous locals from returning. The group’s march past the plant was brief. Otomis, who had joined the caravan from Mexico City, shouted, “Water is not for sale. No more armed forces in our towns.”
The next day, the caravan traveled to San Miguel Xoxtla, a nearby region that European steel company Ternium is turning to dust.
“The small farmers in the area denounced the pollution of air, land and water by the company. Its toxic waste and ashes are spewed out over the land. The wind hits you in the face and it smells very bad. The company consumes millions of liters of water — we don’t know how much exactly because there’s no transparency,” Armando Gomez, an Otomi member of the caravan, told Truthout. He said they also visited other towns and struggles nearby, and described how his clothing and shoes were full of dust because the area, which was previously fertile land, is so dry now.
Ternium’s excessive use of water is leaving locals without, and the runoff from its manufacturing processes is polluting a canal and one of the three main wells in Xoxtla that supplies water to people’s homes. The canal also passes through locals’ corn, bean and zucchini farms, contaminating their crops. Residents have denounced an increase in cancer cases and deaths since Ternium (then Hylsa) began operating. Last year, for the first time during the rainy season, the nearby Prieto River was completely dry, thanks to water use by Ternium.
After a march in Puebla city to protest outside the state parliament, as well as visits to other communities in the state, such as San Isidro Huilotepec, where locals are trying to stop a gas pipeline, the caravan headed to Ahuacatlan in the Sierra Norte mountains on March 27.
There, Totonaco and Nahua people, along with other Mexicans, celebrated what they called “partial victories.” They have managed to stop a mega project which involved building a hydroelectric dam for a Walmart, Suburbia, and other shops that would have left them without water for their crops. Communities in the region have also been organizing for years to shut down open-pit gold mines owned by Canadian company, Almaden Minerals, and another which is part of the Espejeras project. The mines have destroyed thousands of hectares of forest and contaminated domestic water with cyanide used to separate gold from other minerals. Fifty towns also face water shortages due to hydroelectric dams redirecting water to the gold mines.
At the event, activists read out a statement, affirming, “In February and March, after seven years (of resistance), the courts canceled five mining concessions in Ixtacamaxtitlán, Cuetzalan, Tlatlauquitepec and Yaonáhuac.”
A few days later, while in Chilapa, Guerrero, the caravan denounced the organized criminal group, Los Ardillos, for deploying 50 vans and 20 motorcycles in the path of the Indigenous activists. Media and human rights groups were on high alert, and the caravan was on guard all night. Community police accompanied the caravan until it arrived in Mexico City to continue its journey.
Activities as part of the caravan’s visit to Ahuacatlán on March 26.Tamara PearsonThe Indigenous-occupied, former INPI building.Tamara PearsonSecurity forces guard the entrance to the plant that had been run by Indigenous people, as they march past on March 22.Tamara Pearson
There, the caravan held a public meeting in the House of the People and Indigenous Communities — a five-story building formally used by the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI), a federal agency. On October 12, 2020, Otomí people in Mexico City took over the building, and have been running it ever since. They argued that the INPI betrays Indigenous people, and that the institute is indifferent to their needs. For instance, over 100 Otomis have spent years trying to meet the bureaucratic requirements of the INPI and other government agencies in order to claim some abandoned buildings to live in. In the meantime, they had been living in the street. When the pandemic began, the INPI threw out three years of permits and requests, forcing the Otomis to start again. They say the INPI uses their symbols and art, such as the Otomi dolls, while refusing to defend their rights.
In Mexico City, mining, food, entertainment, and other companies consume 850 times more water than households on average, and are a major contributor to water shortages. On April 7, the caravan visited Xochimilco, in the south of the city, where Indigenous people used to farm using a chinampa system, which consists of built-up islands among the huge lakes and canals. For the last century, that water has been sent to Mexico City, leaving local farmers and residents without.
“The canals are drying up; natural water has been replaced with low-quality treated water; the fish we used to eat are gone. We haven’t benefited in any way from supplying the city with water, and we’ve never been consulted. As original peoples, we have to defend our land, our resources, and our self-determination,” Silvia Cabello Molina, a local autonomous council representative, told Truthout.
Xochimilco was an abundant region of lakes and flower and vegetable growing.Tamara PearsonSilvia Cabello Molina, a local autonomous council representative, speaking at a meeting in Xochimilco, as part of the caravan.Tamara Pearson
From Coca-Cola’s illegal water extraction in Apizaco, to privatized water in Puerto de Veracruz, the map of struggles that the caravan has visited and will visit is a detailed one.
The caravan “is a message that (original) peoples are bringing to other peoples and communities, suburbs, organizations. As they go, they bring the message that it is important to struggle, to organize in order to defend water, and life … and that together, it’s possible to stop all this,” Marichuy said. “If communities can’t strengthen their self-determination and autonomy, they leave a space for the mega projects to continue their destruction.”
A long time ago in the Milky Way galaxy on a planet named Earth the trees died. It only happened once in the planet’s history. It was during the Permian-Triassic 252 million years ago.
Henk Visscher, PhD, Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University makes a living studying exposed fossil beds of the transitional period of the Permian to Triassic era, aka: “The Great Dying.” Significantly, layers of fossils prior to the great extinction event contain lots of pollen, typical of a healthy conifer forest. But, in the Permo-Triassic boundary the pollen is replaced by strands of fossilized fungi, representing an exploding population of nature’s scavengers feasting on dead trees.
“Visscher and his colleagues have found elevated levels of fungal remains in Permo-Triassic rocks from all over the world. They call it a ‘fungal spike.’ The same rocks yield few tree pollen grains. Visscher’s conclusion: Nearly all the world’s trees died en masse.” 1
A dreaded repeat performance of tree deaths of 252 million years ago may be starting to re-appear. Throughout the world trees are dying en masse. It’s troubling. Scientists are studying this strange phenomenon in the context of a rugged past event of 252 million years ago.
The upshot, scientists figured out in just the past decade, is that many trees in most landscapes, from the hot, rainy Amazon to cold, dry Alberta, are operating at the limits of their hydraulic systems, even under normal conditions, with little safety margin. That means a hot drought can push them over the threshold. The 2002 drought in the Southwest did exactly that: Tree-ring records would later show it was the driest and worst year for growth in a millennium. No other year even came close. 2
From the Amazon to the Arctic, wildfires are getting bigger, hotter, and more frequent as the climate changes… In many places, forests are no longer regenerating. Some of the world’s most significant stands are instead transitioning to something new. Some will never be the same. Others may not come back at all.3
Trees throughout the world are vulnerable to excessive heat. A warmer atmosphere sucks more moisture from plants and soil. During droughts, trees close pores in leaves, called stomata, or shed leaves entirely, which limits CO2 uptake, leaving trees both hungry and parched all at once.
When soil gets dry enough, trees can no longer maintain pressure in the internal conduits that carry water up to their leaves. Air bubbles interrupt the flow, causing fatal embolisms (obstructions).
Even though the planet has 3, 000,000,000,000 (3T) trees and 10,000,000,000 (10B) acres of forests, scientists are increasingly concerned with the quickening pulse of extreme climate events that essentially prevent forest regeneration such as fire, extraordinarily powerful storms, insect infestations, and most notably, severe heat and drought, all unique to today’s climate change environment.
Climate change undercuts trees in various ways, for example, yellow cedars in Alaska are freezing to death because of early snow melt due to global warming. As the trees lose their snow-cover warming blanket, recurring cold snaps kill them by the thousands. At Africa’s Sahel (SW Morocco) heat and drought has killed 20% of the trees. And, according to the most recent IPCC report, 5-out of-8 of the most abundant tree species in America’s West have significantly declined since 2000.
Camille Stevens-Rumann, a forest ecologist at Colorado State University, examined 1,485 sites from 52 fires in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Washington. The number of burned sites that didn’t recover jumped from 19% before 2000 to 32% thereafter. “And by ‘not recovering,’ I mean not a single tree—not one.”3
Craig Allen, a landscape ecologist, has been warning of danger to trees for the past 20 years: “All this awakened Allen to what he now sees as a grave global threat. ‘Seeing the transformation of this landscape that I’d studied my whole adult life … climate change wasn’t theoretical anymore’… He started tracking the mass mortality events elsewhere. Over the next two decades, heat and drought would kill billions of trees directly and indirectly—in Spain, in South Korea, throughout Australia. In central Siberia, Russia lost two million acres of firs. In Texas in 2011, drought killed more than 300 million trees—one out of every 16 in the state.”3
Tree deaths skyrocketed when the worst drought in 500 years hit central Europe in 2018. Summer temperatures hit nearly 6°F above average. Additionally, from 2018 to 2020 in Germany 750,000 acres of forest died because of excessive heat.
Majestic sequoias in the Far West that have stood the test of time as far back as Julius Caesar’s reign (100-44BC) are under attack. For eons the giants withstood every type of disaster until the Castle fire in August-December 2020 tore through Sequoia National Park, igniting one crown after another. Forest ecologists had never seen anything like it. Up to 14% of large sequoias in the Sierra Nevada were killed or mortally wounded.
Why did the majestic sequoias succumb to a disaster for the first time in centuries? Climate change/global warming was clearly the protagonist. A severe dry spell in the surrounding area had previously killed millions of sugar pines, incense cedars, and white firs in densely packed forests nearby the sequoias where the Castle fire started, which erupted into an inferno like nobody had ever experienced.
A second fire hit a year later in 2021: “The 2021 fires claimed another 3 to 5 percent of large sequoias. Up to 19 percent of these magnificent trees—trees that had weathered everything for a millennium or more—had been lost in just two years.”3
Regarding land temperature impact on tree death, it should be noted, according to James Hansen’s (Earth Institute, Columbia University) “March Temperature Update” as of April 15, 2022: “Note that monthly temperature anomalies on land now commonly exceed +2°C (+3.6°F), with the Arctic anomaly often exceeding +5°C (+9°F).”
Hansen expects 2022 to be substantially warmer than 2021. March 2021 registered 1.3°C warmer than the average for March 1880-1920… “ due to surging growth rates of GHGs (greenhouse gases), etc.”
In that regard, it’s well known that surging growth rates of CO2 and Ch4 are preventable but politically foreordained.
Alert: If monthly temperature anomalies on land (1/3rd of the planet) “commonly exceed +2°C,” as explained by Dr. Hansen, isn’t that the red flashing light danger zone described in IPCC reports, meaning more deadly climate-related disasters come into play much sooner than predicted in climate models?
Yikes!
“The Permian Extinction – When Life Nearly Came to an End”, National Geographic, June 6, 2019.
“The Future of Forests”, National Geographic, April 14, 2022.
The planet is heating up like never before, as “ground temperatures” hit all-time records in the Northern Hemisphere as well as the Southern Hemisphere, and ocean temperatures threaten the world’s major fisheries of the Far North, which are imperiled beyond any known historical precedent.1
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) July 2021 was the hottest month in recorded history for the world. The European Union (EU) satellite system also confirmed that the past seven years have been the hottest on record.
Too much heat brings unanticipated problems of unexpected scale, putting decades of legacy infrastructure at risk of malfunctioning and/or total collapse. Nobody expected so much trouble to start so soon. Nobody anticipated such massive record-breaking back-to-back heat, north and south, to hit so soon on the heels of only 1.2C above estimated baseline for global warming.
In that regard, and with deep concern, the Council on Foreign Relations (founded, 1921) stated: “More than one-fifth of the global population now lives in regions that have already experienced warming greater than 1.5°C (2.7°F), an increase that almost all nations have agreed should be avoided to significantly reduce the risk of harm from climate change.” 2
Moreover, as further stated by the Council: “Exposure to a sustained wet-bulb temperature of 35°C (95°F), a point of intense heat with extreme humidity (90+), has been identified as the limit for human survival. When wet-bulb conditions develop, sweat can no longer evaporate off a person’s skin and the body cannot cool down. Just a few hours of this kind of heat exposure can lead to death… Some regions, including southwestern North America, South Asia, and the Middle East have already endured conditions at or near this limit, and certain areas will experience the effects more intensely than others. One projection indicates that, by 2030, this type of heat wave could afflict over two hundred million people in India alone.”
Notably, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA): Only 8% of the 2.8 billion people living in the hottest parts of the world have air conditioners.
Furthermore, the Council claims: “The infrastructure of today was not built to withstand surging temperatures.” As follows, global heat is rapidly outpacing infrastructure capacities. This is a surefire pathway to disaster on a scale seldom, if ever, witnessed.
Over time, excessive heat impairs and/or destroys infrastructure. Hot weather, when too hot, causes power lines to sag. When water used to cool power plants becomes too hot, electricity production measurably decreases, and drought conditions lower water levels beyond effectiveness for hydropower plants. This is already threatening in Brazil where hydro amounts to 62% of its total installed electric generating capacity. 3
In America, the Hoover Dam, which serves electrical power to 8 million people, is at it lowest level since 1937 when its lake was still being filled.
And, too much heat causes steel-comprising damage to drawbridges. Train tracks can bend under intense heat, which actually caused train cancellations in Europe in 2019. 4 And, planes can struggle to fly in extreme heat conditions.
According to the EPA, when cities are exposed to extreme heat, it can magnify heat conditions by up to 15C above surrounding rural conditions, effectively turning major cities of the world into furnaces of trapped heat.
Already, South America’s summer of 2022 is hot as blazes: “Practically all of Argentina and also neighboring countries such as Uruguay, southern Brazil, and Paraguay are experiencing the hottest days in history.” This is according to Cindy Fernández, meteorologist at the official National Meteorological Service.5
Argentina, as of January 12, 2022 reported: 129°F ground temperatures that brought blackouts. “This is a heat wave of extraordinary characteristics, with extreme temperature values that will even be analyzed after its completion, and it may generate some historical records for Argentina temperatures and persistence of heat,” according to meteorologist Lucas Berengua.6
Thereafter, Argentina’s infrastructure sagged and 700,000 people were without power, and drinking water purification systems went on the blink. Argentina’s ground temperatures echoed readings from the Northern Hemisphere of only 6 months ago, which, in retrospect, served as a foreboding for the southern continent, as it now begins its summer.
The heat has been so bad in Argentina that it was briefly the hottest place in the world, surpassing parts of Australia that usually carry that dubious honor during austral summer.
According to BBC News, Australia equaled its hottest day on record at 50.7C or 123.26F in Onslow, Western Australia on January 13th, 2022. The normal average temperature for Onslow (a coastal town) this time of year is 36.5C, not 50C. Additionally, Mardie and Roebourne, two other towns in the area, reported temperatures over 50C. And, in South Australia Oodnadatta reported 50.7C on January 2, 2022. 7
The summer of 2021 up north found the Anthropocene, the geological period of human influence, turn into the Pyrocene, when a shocking number of wildfires consumed vast areas of the Northern Hemisphere. It was “the summer of hell.” Global warming dried out grasslands and forests turned to tinder. The chief of the US Forest Service declared a “National Wildfire Crisis.” 8
Oregon and California fires were powerful enough to create stand-alone weather systems. The town of Lytton, British Columbia burned to the ground like a smoldering matchstick. Ground temperatures in Washington State in June 2021 hit 145F (63C) during an unprecedented Pacific Northwest heat wave too hot to even walk near concrete or squishy asphalt.
In Canada’s northwest, Ontario and Manitoba experienced 157 severe wildfires intense enough to create stand-alone weather systems.
Siberia experienced Biblical-scale fires like nobody has ever seen. A study showed the extreme heat driving the fires to levels calculated as 600 times more likely to occur because of climate change. Siberia at its most northern reaches registered a shocking 118 degrees F (48C) in June.
In the Mediterranean region, the summer of 2021 experienced wildfires raging out of control in Turkey and Greece with ground temperatures of more than 127F degrees (53C).9
There is a point to be made about this disheartening litany of the world succumbing to heat since it’s happening with global warming at only 1.2C above pre-industrial. But, is pre-industrial (same as post-industrial) really since 1880 or 1950, or should it be 1750, or is the entire affair really worse than we’ve been told at any rate? Answer: Look at the evidence and make a judgment.
The aforementioned facts are about climate conditions over the past 12 months throughout the world, which are worse than anybody projected, especially at only 1.2C above the alleged pre-industrial level. Along those lines, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established a red warning at 1.5C beyond which serious climate trouble will occur with 2C as an extreme limit not to be exceeded, but based upon the challenging climate conditions already evident at 1.2C, how challenging will things be at 1.5C?
The fact is at only 1.2C the world has got its hands full of infrastructure failures combined with an emergent Wet Bulb potentiality of people dropping dead in the streets.
All of which points to the upcoming significance of the US midterm elections this year. If Republicans, aka: Deniers, gain control, you might as well “pack it in.” In other words, global heat will celebrate!
On the other hand, if the Democrats gain enough control to actually do something constructive about greenhouse gases and provide global leadership towards net zero emissions within the decade, there’s a slim chance for survival, but the odds are rapidly diminishing.
So far, excessive levels of damaging global heat, in part, have been the result of the failure of political leadership of both major parties that have repeatedly been warned by scientists to minimize CO2 emissions. The warnings have been ongoing for decades, like a scratched record that replays the same song over and over again but to no avail.
America’s leaders have miserably failed to safeguard the American people from the most advertised, the most talked about, the most obvious existential threat the country has ever experienced!
Human-generated global heat is easy to describe: Whether it’s emissions via carbon dioxide (CO2) or methane (CH4) from cars, trains, planes, trucks, cows, power plants, oil and gas wells, or industry that blankets the atmosphere, thus trapping heat; i.e., “the greenhouse effect,” it predictably and relentlessly causes global temperatures to increase, which have now surpassed all-time highs going back to when humans first rubbed two sticks together.
A devastating climate change-fueled wildfire destroyed nearly 1,000 homes outside of Boulder and Denver, Colorado, with little notice last Thursday. The fire was fanned by winds that gusted up to 110 miles per hour, and came after a year of drought across the western U.S. and amid an unusually warm December. We speak with Jennifer Balch, director of the Earth Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who says the climate crisis is extending the scale and scope of wildfire season in the state. “We’ve known that there’s a link between climate change and wildfires for over a decade, and it takes just a little bit of warming to lead to a lot more burning,” says Balch.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Yes, in Colorado, the still-smoking remains of homes destroyed by the state’s most devastating wildfires in history are now covered in snow. Last Thursday, fast-spreading, climate change-fueled wildfires tore through the towns of Superior and Louisville, Colorado, suburbs of Denver and Boulder, with little notice, as described in this video by an eyewitness.
EYEWITNESS: We’re across the golf course and a pond. We look out to that. So, as we — I pan to the left here, we see huge fires on the other side of 36 right there, significant fires. And then, over here, more fires.
AMYGOODMAN: The origin of the wildfire is under investigation. The flames were fanned by winds that gusted up to 110 miles per hour. Louisville, Colorado, resident Paul Bassis saw his home nearly destroyed in the blaze.
PAULBASSIS: Climate change is here now, that this is not some future threat that we have to deal with at some point someday, but this is here and now. … People lost all their belongings, their memories that were in those homes, families that were raised there.
AMYGOODMAN: The Marshall Fire destroyed about a thousand homes and businesses, and at least two people are still missing and presumed dead. It caps a year of drought across the western U.S., came as temperatures in Colorado between June and December were the warmest on record. A report by NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Drought Task Force, found, without, quote, “stringent” climate mitigation, the region will continue to warm.
For more, we go to Boulder, Colorado, to speak with Dr. Jennifer Balch, director of the Earth Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, very painful under these circumstances. Can you explain what happened? I mean, you, yourself, one of your own scientists, Matt Ross, lost his home in the fire.
JENNIFERBALCH: That’s right. I have many friends and colleagues who lost homes. This has been a disaster. And I’ll go back to basics to try and explain what happened here.
But you need three ingredients for fires. You need it to be warm, you need fuels to burn, and you need a spark or ignition source. We had all three. And as you mentioned, we had one of the warmest periods during our fall and winter on record for the Front Range, which stretches from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins. And leading up to that, we also had a lot of grasses that grew as a function of a really wet spring. So we had a lot of grass fuel. We had very warm conditions, which meant our fuels were very dry. And we had an ignition source that’s still under investigation.
And what made this fire a disaster were two things. One, there were a lot of homes in the way. Thousands of homes have been built into the landscape between Denver and Boulder over the last several decades. And we had very high wind conditions. So those factors together essentially gave us the right conditions for this type of event and this type of disaster.
In the western U.S., we have millions of homes that are in what is called the wildland-urban interface, or where homes intermingle with vegetation. And work that we did demonstrates that over a million homes, over roughly the last two decades, were within wildfire boundaries, and another 59 million homes were within a kilometer of those wildfires. So we’re living with very high fire risk, and we don’t even know it.
AMYGOODMAN: Can you compare what happened in Boulder to what took place in Oregon and California, the size of these fires? I mean, this isn’t even the largest wildfire in Colorado, but it’s the most destructive in a century.
JENNIFERBALCH: That’s right. And it’s among the most destructive wildfires in U.S. history, as well. It’s not just in Colorado. So, the fact that a thousand homes burned to the ground is remarkable.
And comparing to Oregon and California, I think one thing that’s really important to note here is that this is a winter wildfire. And that is an oxymoron. There’s only two other — there’s only one other time in my career when I’ve talked about snow putting out wildfires. And so, this, to me, is an important signal. And we’ve seen this signal across the West. We know that since the 1980s the amount of forests that have burned has doubled, and that’s directly tied to how warm our temperatures are and essentially how dry our fuels have become. We’ve known that there’s a link between climate change and wildfires for over a decade, and it takes just a little bit of warming to lead to a lot more burning. And that’s what we’re seeing. You know, we no longer have a fire season; we have fires all year round.
And this wildfire is small relative to some of the fires in California and Oregon that happened over this summer and happened over the last summer. It’s 6,000 acres relative to some of the biggest wildfires we’ve seen in the lower 48. We saw a million-acre fire over the last couple of years. So this is a small fire, but what made it is disaster is that there are a lot of homes in the way. And that has to do with our development patterns and how we’re building into flammable landscapes. There’s a lot we can do to change how we build into flammable places.
AMYGOODMAN: What can be done?
JENNIFERBALCH: So, we need to rethink how we’re building. There’s a lot of materials that we can use that are not as flammable. So, when we build with wood siding and asphalt roofing and wood decks, those are all flammable materials. We have building codes that make us install sprinklers inside homes and inside industrial buildings, but we don’t have the equivalent building codes to protect our homes from wildfires. California is on the leading edge of this, and now other states need to think seriously about how we’re building homes into flammable places. All of Colorado is flammable. Our grasses are flammable. Our shrubs are flammable. Our trees are flammable. This is a dry landscape that’s flammable most of the year now. And so we need to rethink how we’re building into these places.
AMYGOODMAN: And the drought. Can you talk about the effect of, what, this historic 20-year drought before the wildfire? From July to December, Denver recorded the lowest amount of precipitation.
JENNIFERBALCH: Yeah. So, moisture is another huge factor. So it’s not only temperature increase, it’s also how much moisture we’re getting. And we didn’t get a lick of moisture in this region before this wildfire started. And so, how much rain or snow we get plus warm temperatures essentially equates to really, really dry fuels, and drier over a period of time. And not only that, but the plants are stressed out, and so they die, and they become dead fuel to burn, which is much more flammable. I mean, essentially, what happened with this fire in the first few hours was that it moved through an open space that was essentially a grassland. It had an entire runway of grass to go through for several miles before it started to hit neighborhoods. And essentially, what that meant was there was a very long active fire line that was moving towards those homes in very dry fuels.
AMYGOODMAN: What do you say to climate change deniers like, well, Colorado’s own Congressmember Lauren Boebert?
JENNIFERBALCH: It’s frustrating. The science has been known for over a decade that there’s a link between warming and wildfires. And we need to move past it and acknowledge it in order to build solutions. You know, we’re essentially sitting ducks to the repercussions of climate change if we don’t acknowledge it. And I think part of the solution is acknowledging it and figuring out how we can live with increasing fire in the future. We’re going to build back, but I hope that Colorado builds back smarter, thinking about how we can build more fire-resilient homes and fire-resilient communities moving forward.
AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there. I want to thank you so much for being with us, Dr. Jennifer Balch, director of Earth Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
And that does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman. Remember, wearing a mask is an act of love.
In early spring 2021, it became obvious that California’s rivers and the people who depend on their salmon were facing disaster. Forecasts for the Klamath River predicted some of the lowest salmon returns on record and low allocations for tribal fishers. The once snow-peaked mountains stood bare and parched. Reservoirs were still low from previous year’s water deliveries that favored industrial agriculture over salmon and tribal people. There was not going to be enough water for both fish and agriculture.
Spring and winter run Chinook and Coho salmon were nearing extinction in many watersheds, yet the state was doing little to nothing to preserve water for California’s salmon runs, which were quickly becoming casualties of the state and federal governments’ destructive water infrastructure.
California was poised to deliver water to agriculture rather than use its own laws to protect reservoir storage and river flows. Salmon and drinking water supplies were threatened as a result of poor water policy and an outdated water rights system.
Water justice advocates knew what to expect from previous droughts. The issue of water inequality in California is not new. California’s water rights system is a holdover from the California gold rush, a time when neither women nor people of color could own land or vote. During this time, Native people were not citizens. In fact, California’s first governor informed the legislature that “a war of extermination will continue to be waged between races, until the Indian race becomes extinct.” Now even though Tribal water rights are encoded in the law, California largely ignores these rights.
Similarly, California’s federal Central Valley Water project, which includes Shasta and Trinity Reservoirs at the headwaters to the state’s largest rivers, were built exclusively to benefit large industrial agricultural interests in the arid southern Central Valley to aid development. The state part of the Central Valley project largely focused on damming Sierra tributaries to build cities. Both parts of the Central Valley Water Project targeted Tribal trust lands and relied on Tribal termination policies. This water rights system led to a situation where five times as much water is allocated than exists. Now powerful farming interests like rice farmers can use four times as much water as cities such as Los Angeles, even as climate change is making droughts commonplace.
In 2021 these conditions created the perfect storm capable of obliterating already struggling salmon populations. For Native people, the loss of salmon is apocalyptic. Water and salmon are the cornerstone for ceremony, spirituality, sustenance and physical existence. Scientists have even linked compromised mental health, as well as increased diabetes, heart disease and obesity to dwindling salmon returns.
“What many don’t understand is that California is a salmon state, and what happens to the salmon happens to us,” said Chief Caleen Sisk, spiritual leader of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe. “What happens to the people if salmon runs are nearing extinction, and if the rivers are dangerously low and full of algae? Not only did Newsom and the state fail to take any actions to protect reservoir’s storage or river flows in Northern California this year, they actually tried to say that actions like building Sites Reservoir and voluntary agreements for water withdrawals are drought measures. These proposals benefit industrial agriculture which uses 80 percent of the state’s water, not the North State or Tribal communities. Salmon benefit us.”
The dire state of the salmon, in addition to quickly dwindling reservoir storage, led many tribes and environmental groups to organize actions, lawsuits and protests to try to avert disaster. They knew that in the past, the state chose to let whole broods of salmon die rather than challenge the powerful agriculture industry and deal with its outdated water rights system.
Bad water decisions during the 2014-2015 drought killed over 90 percent of the Sacramento River’s winter run salmon babies and eggs, and killed almost all of Klamath River’s juvenile fall chinook salmon for three consecutive years.
The issue came to a head at the height of California’s drought last spring, when the federal Department of Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) proposed to keep the Trump administration’s plan in place for managing the Central Valley Water Project, and turned in a temperature management plan (TMP) for the Shasta Reservoir, which violated the Endangered Species Act, to the California State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) for the Shasta Reservoir. This plan would let almost 90 percent of the endangered winter run Chinook salmon die. Tribes and environmental groups confronted the SWRCB in public hearings and even turned in an alternate plan for managing diversions from the Shasta and Trinity reservoirs. Ultimately, the state approved the plan put forward by the BOR. The BOR then violated the plan every day this summer but one and killed even more winter-run Chinook salmon than expected, along with most the spring and fall-run salmon in the river. The state has yet to take any action for these violations and is currently considering another plan to violate state water quality laws.
My organization, Save California Salmon, a grassroots group dedicated to restoring rivers through restoring flows and salmon habitat, removing dams and improving water quality throughout Northern California, teamed up with tribal representatives to hold a virtual “State of the Salmon” event in May to inform the public about the looming disaster and the need to take action.
At the event, Amy Cordalis, attorney for the Yurok Tribe, explained, “Our salmon are in the poorest condition they’ve ever been in and that’s hard as a Tribal person to even say, to even acknowledge because that hurts us to our core. Many people know that the Klamath River was once the third-largest salmon producing river in the whole west … now it’s very hard to acknowledge that there are so few fish left.”
As spring progressed, the situation worsened. Almost all of the juvenile Klamath salmon died in the Klamath River from a disease called Ceratonova shasta, or C. shasta. The C. shasta was spread by a host parasite that thrives in the low water conditions in dammed watersheds.
Scientists have said that Klamath dam removal would greatly reduce C. shasta numbers because the host parasite cannot thrive in flowing rivers. In past years, water has been released to stop the spread of C. shasta. In 2021, however, the Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees water resource management, denied the Yurok Tribe’s request for water releases, leaving many tribal biologists with the morbid job of counting dead salmon.
“I have worked for Yurok fisheries for 23 years and extinction was never part of the conversation, but over the last five to seven years, there’s been an overall decline within the lower basin,” Yurok Tribal biologist Jamie Holt said. “We have seen increased water temperatures, longer durations of high temperatures and lack of river flow leading to disease distribution. These factors led to the large-scale fish kill we witnessed in the spring. If we have another die off of this level, we will be discussing extinction.”
Holt explained that the Yurok Tribe has seen at least a two-thirds reduction in juvenile fish in only a few years due to the juvenile fish kill. She said the C. Shasta hot zone has gone from a short section of the river to over a hundred miles long, right through the middle of the Yurok reservation. The situation is taking a toll on tribal biologists.
“My feelings are equal parts anger and sadness. As a scientist, this is so frustrating as so many people have called out the mismanagement of the river and said what needs to happen for so long,” Holt said. “As a Yurok person I was put here to take care of these fish. I feel like we are really sinking here.”
Meanwhile, downriver alfalfa farmers in two major salmon tributaries of the Klamath River, the Scott and Shasta rivers, started irrigating their fields in early spring without the restrictions that the BOR’s Klamath Irrigation Project irrigators faced. River flows dropped quickly. The Shasta River, the only spring-fed tributary of the Klamath below the Klamath dams, is one of the main producers of fall-run Chinook salmon, the main salmon run that still feeds the Klamath Basin tribes. The Scott River is the main spawning ground in the Upper Klamath for Coho Salmon, an endangered species. Most years, both rivers run dry by fall due to uncontrolled water diversions. In 2021 they started going dry in early summer.
The dire situation on the Scott and Shasta rivers nudged tribal members and local residents to start calling into every California SWRCB hearing, and for the Karuk Tribe to file a legal petition requesting that the water board take immediate action to curtail irrigation deliveries in the Scott Valley.
“The worst water conditions in history led federal agencies to shut off 1,300 farms in the Upper Basin, but in the Scott Valley water users continue business as usual,” Karuk Chairman Russell ‘Buster’ Attebery said in a statement about why the tribe asked California to curtail water diversions from the Scott River. “They are dewatering the last stronghold of Coho salmon in the Klamath Basin driving them to extinction.”
In the Trinity River — the Klamath’s largest tributary and the only Klamath River tributary that is diverted into California’s Central Valley Water Project — the Hoopa Valley Tribe warned the Bureau of Reclamation that the river was suffering unusually high temperatures and was experiencing a toxic algae bloom. The Trinity is normally relied upon as a cool water source offering relief to salmon below its confluence with the Klamath River. In 2021 adult spring-run Chinook salmon that would typically seek refuge in cool tributary waters had few places to go where water temperatures are not lethal. They were crowding at the mouths of creeks, making them vulnerable to disease and predation.
The Klamath-Trinity spring Chinook salmon, which had recently become listed as endangered under state law due to a petition by the Karuk Tribe, were beginning to be affected by Columnaris (gill rot), the same disease that killed more than 64,000 adult salmon in 2002.
Tribes were able to get a three-day water release to help these springers move before they died. However, as the flows were being released, a comment period on a plan to divert another 36,000 acre-feet of water from the Trinity reservoirs to the Sacramento River closed. This plan threatened future water releases for the Trinity and Klamath salmon and drinking water sources.
“Sending water out of the Trinity River system is bad enough, but to send additional water out of basin during an extreme drought leaves our salmon even more vulnerable,” said Allie Hostler, Hoopa Tribal member and advisory board member of Save California Salmon. “To make it through this dry season, we needed to fight to retain at least 600,000 acre-feet behind Trinity Dam. We were lucky we did not see another catastrophic fish kill. Continuing to deplete water storage while big ag gets water deliveries for non-essential crops is not acceptable.”
All summer the tribes met with the Bureau of Reclamation weekly to discuss water conditions and to check temperature and water quality.
“The Hoopa Valley Tribe has fought since time immemorial to retain cold, clean water in the Trinity River,” Chairman Joe Davis said. “Although we’ve won several landmark cases, the pressure continues to rise as we see our salmons’ health dwindling and more demand for our cold, clean water. We are prepared to continue our fight and keep Trinity River water in the Trinity River system.”
By the time the water year was over in October the Trinity River’s reservoirs carry over storage was drained to last than 29 percent.
As the fight for California’s water raged on, the Winnemem Wintu Tribe began preparations for its 300-mile Run4Salmon from the McCloud River above the Shasta Reservoir to the San Francisco Bay. This year, to draw attention to the crisis, the run followed the journey of the outmigration of young salmon as they struggled for survival, and included a Trinity River connection run.
“Run4Salmon is a way to get people onto the water, to see how the water is treated, where it is exported, and to help people think outside the box about water,” said Chief Sisk of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe. “Many people think the water is exported for drinking water, but it is not; it is mainly diverted to industrial agriculture, which continues to expand. These are not farmers feeding Americans, it is big ag, exporting crops like almonds. Our salmon, a healthy food source, are facing extinction; almonds and pistachios are not.”
Trinity and Klamath Tribes ran and prayed with the Winnemem Wintu runners along the route that brings Trinity water into the Sacramento River and then down to industrial farms in the Central Valley.
As the Winnemem Wintu Tribe and other Sacramento River, Bay Delta and Bay Area Tribes ran, rode on horseback, boated, biked and prayed for the salmon, a massive adult fish kill of Endangered Species Act-listed spring-run Chinook salmon unfolded on Butte Creek, a tributary of the Sacramento River.
Butte Creek was the one watershed in California where spring salmon were actually recovering. Over 20,000 adult spring salmon were returning to Butte Creek to spawn when they began to die from the outbreak of two fish diseases, ich and columnaris. By the time the summer was over, at least 16,000 adult spring Chinook died in Butte Creek. Local advocates blamed Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) dams and diversions for the fish kill.
“We have to allow fish to swim into the upper watershed and make sure that the water is cold by not diverting it out of the stream. What a tragedy it is to lose so many fish when there’s available habitat and available water and a failing PG&E hydroelectric system is the only thing in the way,” Allen Harthorn, executive director of Friends of Butte Creek, toldSacramento News and Review.
In the Klamath watershed, the annual Salmon River Spring Chinook Cooperative Dive – an event at which trained divers count all the spring Chinook and summer steelhead in the Salmon River — had even bleaker news. Less than two months after their listing under the California Endangered Species Act, only 100 wild adult spring salmon, once the predominant run in the watershed, had returned
“The cultural significance of the Spring Salmon is beyond Euro-American conception. It’s more than just a policy trying to get passed through,” said Hoopa Valley Tribal member and Karuk Spring Salmon Ceremonial Priest Ryan Reed. “The Spring Salmon are our relatives who are facing extinction, and a part of our lifestyle, cultural longevity and the survival of my people.”
Reed was one of many tribal members that testified at a state Endangered Species Act hearing this spring that the last thing they wanted was for such an important food source to be listed as threatened; however, extinction was a worst option.
Right after the Run4Salmon concluded with an intertribal ceremony just north of San Francisco, the California SWRCB made the decision to finally cut off water diversions to additional Bay Delta farmers and to junior water right holders in the Scott and Shasta rivers. By that time the Scott River was only a series of pools full of trapped salmon.
We testified in favor of the curtailments at a State Water Board hearing. We explained: “These curtailments are vital and coming a little too late. Fishermen and tribes are facing incredibly huge losses over and over again.”
Due to the water inequalities that climate change is highlighting, Save California Salmon is one of several organizations asking for the state to reassess water rights in California. As we explained in a letter to the Los Angeles Times editor in June, “Who gets clean water in California is a social justice issue.… The climate crisis highlights the fact that California has to reassess its antiquated water-rights system. Cities, native people and rivers should not continue to be without water while farmers flood their land.”
For more information, please visit www.californiasalmon.org or follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
The UK (in partnership with Italy) will host the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties, COP26 in Glasgow on October 31- November 12, 2021.
COP26 will be one of the most significant meetings in modern human history, comparable to the meeting of the Big Three at the Tehran Conference November 28, 1943 when the Normandy invasion was agreed, codenamed Operation Overlord and launched in June 1944. Thenceforth, tyranny was stopped, an easily identified worldwide threat symbolized by a toothbrush mustache. Today’s tyranny is faceless but recklessly beyond the scope of that era because it’s already everywhere all at once! And, ten-times-plus as powerful as all of the munitions of WWII.
What’s at risk at COP26?
Chatham House, The Royal Institute of International Affairs answers that all-important query in a summary report intended for heads of governments, entitled: Climate Change Risk Assessment 2021.
The report introduces the subject with three key statements:
1) The World is dangerously off track to meet the Paris Agreement goals.
2) The risks are compounding.
3) Without immediate action the impacts will be devastating in the coming decades.
The report highlights current emissions status with resulting temperature pathways. Currently, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) indicate 1% reduction of emissions by 2030 as compared to 2010 levels. To that end, and somewhat shockingly, if emissions are not drastically curtailed by 2030, the report details a series of serious impacts to humanity locked in by 2040-50, which is the time-frame for item #3 to kick in, which states: “Impacts will be devastating.”
But, hark: Governments at COP26 will have an opportunity to accelerate emissions reductions by “ambitious revisions of their NDCs.” Whereas, if emissions follow the current NDCs, the chance of keeping temperatures below 2°C above pre-industrial levels (the upper limit imposed by Paris ’15) is less than 5%.
Not only that, but any relapse or stasis in emissions reduction policies could lead to a worst case 7°C, which the paper labels a 10% chance at the moment.
The paper lambastes the current fad of “net zero pledges” which “lack policy detail and delivery mechanisms.” Meanwhile, the deficit between the NDC targets and the carbon budget widens by the year. In essence, empty pledges don’t cut it, period!
Failure to slash emissions by 2030 will have several serious negative impacts by 2040:
9B people will be hit by major heatwaves at various intervals of time.
400 million people will be exposed to temperatures that exceed “the workability threshold.” Too hot to work!
Of more immediate and extremely shocking concern, if drastic reductions do not occur by 2030, the paper suggests “the number of people on the planet exposed to heat stress exceeding the survivability threshold is likely to surpass 10 million a year.” This can only refer to the infamous Wet Bulb Temperature, meaning:A threshold is reached when the air temperature climbs above 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) and the humidity is above 90 percent. The human body has limits. If “temperature plus humidity” is high enough, or +95/90, even a healthy person seated in the shade with plentiful water to drink will suffer severely or likely die. Climate models only a few years ago predicted widespread wet-bulb thresholds to hit late this century; however, global warming is not waiting around that long. Indeed, the Wet Bulb Temperature death count of 10 million per year nearly scales alongside WWII deaths of 75 million, both military and civilian, over six years or 12.5M per year.
Population demands will necessitate 50% more food by 2050, but without huge emissions reductions starting now, yields will decline by 2040 as croplands hit by severe drought rises to 32%/year. Fifty percent more food demand in the face of 32% rise in drought impact does not add up very well.
Wheat and rice account for 37% of calorific intake, but without drastic cuts, >35% of global cropland for these critical crops will be hit by damaging hot spells.
By 2040, without the big cuts in emissions, 700 million people per year will be exposed to droughts lasting at least 6 months duration at a time. “No region will be spared.”
Accordingly “Many of the impacts described are likely to be locked in by 2040, and become so severe they go beyond the limits of what many countries can adapt to… Climate change risks are increasing over time, and what might be a small risk in the near term could embody overwhelming impacts in the medium to long term.” (Pg. 5)
Chapter 4 of the paper covers Cascading Systemic Risks, which is an eye-opener. Systemic risks materialize as a chain, or cascade, impacting a whole system, inclusive of people, infrastructure, economy, societal systems and ecosystems. 70 experts analyzed cascading risks, as follows: “The cascading risks over which the participating experts expressed greatest concern were the interconnections between shifting weather patterns, resulting in changes to ecosystems, and the rise of pests and diseases, which, combined with heatwaves and drought, will likely drive unprecedented crop failure, food insecurity and migration of people. Subsequently, these impacts will likely result in increased infectious diseases (greater prevalence of current infectious diseases, as well as novel variants), and a negative feedback loop compounding and amplifying each of these impacts.” (Pg. 38)
“Climate change contributes to the creation of conditions that are more susceptible to wildfires, principally via hotter and drier conditions. In the period 2015–18, measured against 2001–14, 77 per cent of countries saw an increase in daily population exposure to wildfires, with India and China witnessing 21 million and 12 million exposures respectively. California experienced a fivefold increase in annual burned area between 1972 and 2018. There, average daytime temperatures of warm-season days have increased by around 1.4°C since the early 1970s, increasing the conditions for fires, and consistent with trends simulated by climate models.” (Pg. 39)
And, the biggest shocking statistic of all pertains to the high risk red code danger region of the planet that is ripe for massive methane emissions: “In Siberia, a prolonged heatwave in the first half of 2020 caused wide-scale wildfires, loss of permafrost and an invasion of pests. It is estimated that climate change has already made such events more than 600 times more likely in this region.” (Pg. 40)
“600 times more likely” in the planet’s most methane-enriched permafrost region is reason enough to cut CO2 missions to the bone, no questions asked.
Several climate change issues dangerously reflect on fragility of the food system and a pronounced lack of adaptation measures as well as natural systems and ecosystems “at the edge of capacity.” Lack of social safety and social cohesion is found everywhere, all of which can erupt as a result of an unforgiving climate system that is overly stressed and broken.
Cascades will likely lead to breakdown of governance due to limited food supplies and lack of income bringing on increasingly violent extremists groups, paramilitary intervention, organized violence, and conflict between people and states, all of which has already commenced.
Already, migration pressures are a leading edge of climate-related breakdowns in society. Each year in 2008-20 an average of 21.8 million people have been displaced by weather-related disasters of extreme heat, floods, storms, and wildfires. In the most recent year, 30 million people in 143 countries worldwide were displaced by such climate disasters.
Without doubt, the eyes of the world will be focused on COP26 to judge commitments by governments.
There is no time left for failure because failure breeds even worse failure.
The Amazon rainforest is arguably the world’s premier asset. Indeed, it’s the world’s most crucial asset in a myriad of ways, nothing on Earth compares. Yet, it is infernally stressed because of inordinate drought. The bulk of the Amazon rainforest is located in Brazil, where, according to the title of an article in NASA, Earth Observatory, the country headline says it all: “Brazil Battered by Drought.”
Moreover, the planet is becoming a drought-besieged planet (see Drought Clobbers the World, August 27, 2021). As for the Amazon, according to NASA, it has been battered by serious bouts of drought every 5 years 1998, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020-21. As such, the normally resilient forest does not have a chance to catch breath and repair damage.
Sassan Saatchi, NASA JPL claims:
The old paradigm was that whatever carbon dioxide we put up in (human caused) emissions, the Amazon would help absorb a major part of it… The ecosystem has become so vulnerable to these warming and episodic drought events that it can switch from sink to source depending on the severity and the extent. This is our new paradigm. 1
The Amazon rainforest is 60% of the world’s rainforests; the rainfall and rivers cover 70% of South America’s GDP; its skyborne river of moisture sends rainfall to the Western US and as far as Iowa cornfields and Central America; its trees store 86B tons of carbon; 30% of world species, medical discoveries galore, and automatically one of the biggest consumers of the industrial world’s CO2. Its health is crucial to the functionality of the entire planet. As it goes, so goes the world.
All of its great attributes, and yet, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil last week said the country’s hydroelectric dam reservoirs are: “At the limit of the limit.”2
Reservoirs in the Paraná River, which provide power for Sao Paulo and several states in Brazil “have never before been so depleted, the grid operator said this month. ”3
The Paraná River basin is home to several hydroelectric dams and reservoirs. Water levels on the river are more than 30 feet below average at the Brazil – Paraguay border. This threatens to disrupt cargo ship traffic. Brazil’s National Weather and Basic Sanitation Agency has declared a “critical situation” for the river basin.
For the first time in 100 years, because of the long drought, the National Meteorological System (Inmet) issued an emergency alert for Brazil at the end of May 2021.
The Paraná River runs from Brazil to Argentina. It is the second longest (4,800 km or approximately 3,000 miles) river in Brazil, just behind the Amazon. It supplies electricity and water to 40 million people. At the current hydro flow rate, blackouts are likely this year, especially during peak hours.
Additionally, Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetlands, not only suffers from global warming’s knack for spiking severe drought, more than 25% of Brazil’s Pantanal forest went up in flames last year in the worst annual fire devastation since records started. As it happens, developers set fires to clear land to grow crops, raise cattle and mine. People are responsible for 95% of the fires. It’s important to emphasize that fires in rainforests are not a regular feature of the natural environment.
As it happens, Brazil is not alone as hemispheric drought is now occurring in parallel, north and south.
Both northern and southern hemispheric droughts are running in parallel, sending a strong message that something’s horribly wrong. It should not be this pervasive. Brazil’s depleting reservoirs provide electricity and water to 40 million people. In tandem, the depleting Colorado River provides electricity and water to 40 million people. Both systems, at the same time, will likely be subject to water rationing within months, not years, which is currently under consideration by authorities in both hemispheres.
The worldwide drought is universally connected and thus compounded, maybe feeding on its own energy, enhanced by massive human-generated emissions of CO2 (carbon dioxide) and CH4 (methane) blanketing the atmosphere.
Additionally, in Brazil and only recently, scientists have discovered a very disturbing consequence of drought: Brazil’s share of the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, has seen its water-cover area drop to one-quarter (25%) of its area of only 30 years ago. However, that analysis does not include 2021, which is shaping up as Brazil’s worst drought in over 90 years.
Pantanal wetlands are enormous, sprawling across three countries. The loss of so much water cover is a real shocker to the scientists that conducted the study. According to Mažeika Patricio Sulliván, an ecology professor at Ohio State University, the human footprint of deforestation, fires, and plowing under wetlands is, in part, to blame as well as greenhouse gas emissions, prompting global warming: “We’re altering the magnitude of those natural processes… This is not just happening in Brazil. It’s happening all over the world,”3
Increasingly, scientists send the same message… “It’s happening all over the world.”
Nearly 90% of South America’s wetlands have vanished since 1900. Wetlands are the kidneys of the planet, essential for wildlife and retaining water to be released into rivers and aquifers all of which also serves to prevent destructive flash floods — think Germany’s and China’s loss of wetland regions, thereafter submerged in flash floods.
According to Cassio Bernardino, a project manager for WWF-Brazil:
The prospects are not good; we’re losing natural capital, we’re losing water that feeds industries, energy generation and agribusiness… society as a whole is losing this very precious resource, and losing it at a frighteningly fast rate. 3
By now, with a Brazilian quasi-dystopian experience front and center for all of the world to see, plus the affront by society’s lack of concern for life-sourcing ecosytems, a provocative question arises: Where is all of this headed?
The current trajectory looks dark and bleak.
What can be done?
A good starting point would be for the world’s leaders to agree to tackle the source of the problem, fossil fuels, by first admitting there is a problem, which is the problem. They really have not admitted it forcibly enough to make a big enough difference. Will they?
And, so it stands.
“NASA Finds Amazon Drought Leaves Long Legacy of Damage”, Capitals Coalition, August 9, 2013.
“Diane Jeantet, Associated Press, “Brazil Water Survey Heightens Alarm Over Extreme Drought”, Midland Daily News, August 27, 2021.
According to SPEI Global Drought Monitor, no continent is spared the ravages of severe drought, except for Antarctica. This is happening at a global temperature of 1.2°C above baseline, not 1.5°C above baseline which climate scientists agree is locked in. This article explores the countrywide impact of 1.2°C above baseline for the most vulnerable as well as the most privileged. The journey starts in Glasgow.
The world’s political leaders need to pay special attention to the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference scheduled for November 1st-12th in Glasgow as scientists of the world meet to present the latest info on climate change/global warming.
Those world leaders need to hone in on the most far-reaching most effective most promising ideas to fix the climate, tame global warming, and stop fossil fuels by doing whatever it takes to halt carbon emissions (Biden’s plan won’t do it).
Climatically, how much longer can the planet hang in there?
The world is coming apart at the seams as a result of greenhouse gas emissions from factories, utilities, cars, planes, trains, agriculture, and a horrifying meltdown of permafrost in the farthest northern latitudes, spiked by Biblical fires, and soon the rainforests will kick in as tipping points trigger, thus reversing the world’s greatest carbon sinks to carbon emission sources in competition with cars, trains, and planes. The entire planet is trapped in a drought that’s so severe that it’s difficult to quantify. It’s that pervasive.
By ignoring science for far too long, leaders of the world have failed their own people. To that end, if the world’s leaders cannot figure out what’s happening to the climate system as fire, drought, and floods strike like never before (explained in more detail herein) then they should be tossed out of office. Weak leaders beget feeble solutions.
After all, there is little room for error for society at large. Climate change has backed them into a corner from which they can barely escape, maybe not at all. Soon, there will be no choice other than outright revolution, forcing the world’s leaders out, similar to the French Revolution of the late 18th century when aristocracy and royalty, the one percent (1%) of the era, holding onto their heads for dear life, fled Paris by the thousands, many fleeing to England (See: Ninety-Three, by Victor Hugo, 1874 publication detailing The Great Terror)
Throughout history when the masses are harmed or abused beyond some undefined incongruous limit, but enough to seek recompense, they follow the money, similar to The Revolutions of 1848 and actually witnessed in person by aristocrats in the streets, holding their breath whilst horrified by the Storming of the Bastille, July 14, 1789.
As it happens, ubiquitous drought conditions know no boundaries. A Middle East water crisis is threatening millions of people to the precipice of famine. According to a recent AP article, Aid Groups: Millions in Syria, Iraq Losing Access to Water d/d August 23, 2021, it is a dire situation that, by default, could lead to desperate open warfare and massive human tragedy.
In the face of extreme heat, millions of people in Syria and Iraq and Lebanon are at risk of losing access to essentials for life: (1) water (2) electricity (3) food. Similar to America’s West, water resources are at record lows due to little rainfall and drought conditions caused by global warming now widely recognized as an anthropogenic affair, meaning “human-caused” for the benefit of those who’ve missed class.
More than 12 million people in those countries are at risk, today, right now. And, making matters much worse, two dams in northern Syria that supply power to 3 million people face “imminent closure” because of low water levels (a new phenomena starting to appear throughout the world). Moreover, drought conditions are spreading water-borne diseases throughout displacement settlements. Alas, the Middle East crisis stands above all crises.
What will the people do? Will they fight for survival? Indeed, the situation is fraught with danger. It’s a time bomb that’s already ticking.
In Lebanon 4 million people face severe water shortage. Not only that but making matters equally bad, in addition to severe drought, the Litani River is overloaded with sewage and waste and polluted nearly beyond recognition. It is the country’s longest river and major source for water supply, irrigation, and hydropower.
The planet is aching, crying out for relief. It’s truly a worldwide crisis. Global warming is strutting its stuff whilst greenhouse gases increase beyond all-time record levels, never decreasing, heating up the planet more and more to the breaking point at the global temperature of 1.2°C above baseline, not 1.5°C above, not 2.0°C above.
What of 1.5°C (IPCC’s top end preference) or 2.0°C above baseline as discussed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, levels that should not be exceeded? Yet, uh-oh, the planet is already in trouble at 1.2°C above baseline. Indeed, it’s an open secret that the climate system is struggling; it’s in trouble.
“The climate in trouble” resonates far and wide; e.g., Fridays for Future, started in 2018 by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, which is a very popular org for young activists, is openly critical of the outright stupidity and blatant ignorance of adults. “How Dare You!” blurted Greta Thunberg age 16 at the UN Climate Summit in NY in 2019, as she addressed an imperial body of climate intellects.
Droughts take no prisoners, as the entire Mediterranean region has been hit hard. Turkey faces its most severe drought in a decade. Istanbul is dangerously close to losing its water supply. Dr. Akgun Ilhan, a Turkish water mgmt. expert told Euronews: “The natural water cycle is already interrupted by climate change,” but Dr. İlhan suggests it’s also affected by urban surfaces that are sealed with asphalt and concrete (the human footprint) “leaving very little green spaces where water can meet soil and fill groundwater resources.”
Worldwide, wetlands are down 87% over the past 200+ years, only 13% remains as they’re plowed under or covered over with no green spaces for water to meet soil or fill groundwater resources. It is significant that wetlands are the primary source for replenishment of aquifers.
Alas, with 87% of wetland hydrologic systems gone, massive destructive floods precede ironic losses of aquifer resources. With wetlands gone, water goes to where the people live (think Germany or China) and not through nature’s wetlands for distribution via the natural hydrology network. Meantime, according to NASA, one-third of the world’s largest aquifers are “stressed” because of the loss of wetland feeder systems. This is an invisible monumental festering problem.
In the United States, nearly one-half of the country is currently afflicted by drought. Worse yet, the West is experiencing ultra dire conditions, the worst in 1,200 years, with several small outlying communities suffering complete (100%) loss of water. Arizona is already calculating what industries will be forced to cut water in the near future as the Colorado River is already overly stressed and overly depleted, unable to meet heavy demand.
Brazil’s drought is the worst ever recorded. Hydroelectric plants can’t fully operate because of low reservoir levels. Chile has endured a mega drought for years. According to a recent Reuters report: 400,000 people who live in rural areas of Chile today receive water via tanker trucks. Chile’s spectacular “Mediterranean climate” in the central region, home to vineyards and farms, has taken a big hit. Scientists doubt it’ll ever recover its spectacular climate zone.
Even Israel, which invested $500 million in the world’s largest desalination plant, supplying 20% of its water needs, is warning citizens that the drought/water crisis is so severe that it will “struggle” to provide all residents with enough water to meet basic needs by next summer.
In Russia, some agricultural regions are at risk of losing up to one-half of their harvest because of punishing drought. Russia’s famous Black Earth Region, nicknamed as such because of its world famous high soil moisture content is now a bleak greyish color. Meanwhile, drought in Madagascar has pushed the country to the edge of famine.
A recent major research report claims that since 2014 Europe has experienced the most extreme series of droughts and heat waves in more than 2,000 years. 1
According to BBC News, in Taiwan, considered one of the “rainiest places in the world,” many reservoirs are at less than 20% of capacity and some below 10%. At the primary water source for Taiwan’s $100B semiconductor industry, the water at Baoshan No. 2 Reservoir is at 7%. This has serious international business ramifications.
The list of drought conditions hitting every continent, except Antarctica, is overwhelming. Indeed, the worldwide drought should be categorized as a triple-extra-alarm emergency with all hands on deck. Will it be?
Will world leaders convene to stop fossil fuel destruction of the planet?
Or, will a neglected broken climate system force people to fight for survival, and what does that imply?
“Recent European Drought Extremes Beyond Common Era Background Variability”, Nature Geoscience, March 15, 2021.
The IPCC’s latest report should be a wake-up call to governments everywhere, but it’s going to take more than science to force action by the biggest global emitters, writes Barry Sheppard.
U.S House Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) recently introduced a bill in Congress to overhaul GDP, the nation’s most watched economic indicator. July 30th she introduced the Genuine Progress Indicator (“GPI”) Act. It would be a significant change for the trajectory of the socio-economic system.
GPI is a new way to calculate GDP, but passage of the act in Congress is dependent upon whether it can displace the all-important “only size matters” syndrome that underlies and determines GDP. In contrast, GPI offers considerable substance and a new way to measure economic performance that’s in concert with the planet and with its inhabitants.
Hopefully, GPI gets a decent hearing in Congress because major turning points in socio-economic and political affairs can make a difference for generations to come.
A prime example of a positive turning point is the Battle of Saratoga in 1777 victory by the colonists over the British, which was the world’s greatest army at the time. It was a crucial turning point in the American Revolution, convincing France to enter the conflict on behalf of the colonists. That turning point brought forth a new nation.
In contrast, an example of a negative turning point is the Supreme Court 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision upholding Louisiana’s statute mandating segregation in all public facilities, thus legally embedding bigotry for nearly 60 years. That turning point still stings.
Today, we may be witnessing one more major turning point via Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN). Her proposal has the potential to change the socio-economic trajectory of America and the world in a multitude of ways by leveling the playing field for income distribution, infrastructure development, fair labor practices and ecosystem sustainability, none of which GDP recognizes.
GDP only measures the “size of the economy” whereas GPI measures the true breadth of economic benefits and losses, such as: (1) unpaid labor (2) sustainable job skills (3) infrastructure and (4) ecosystems services, as well as accounting for the costs of growth and its collateral issues: (a) resource depletion (b) greenhouse gases (c) income inequality, and (d) domestic abuse. GDP ignores all of the aforementioned.
GPI may be the only way to unify attention for badly needed mitigation efforts of life-sourcing ecosystems. Without them, the planet will die.
Meanwhile, as for GDP, certain questions must be addressed: Growth for whom and at what costs? GDP does not husband life-sustaining resources, but it does consume those same resources, which is an overt expression of a civilization that has lost its way on a trip down the proverbial rabbit hole.
Omar’s proposed bill says: “To direct the Secretary of Commerce to establish an alternative metric for measuring the net benefits of economic activity, and for other purposes… the ‘genuine progress indicator’ to measure the economic well-being of households, calculated through adjustments to gross domestic product that account for positive and negative economic, environmental, and social factors that contribute to economic activity….” That is brilliant!
The “costs” listed within GPI actually define the impending extinction risks for the world at large, for example, costs that are missing from GDP but included within GPI: (1) water, air, and noise pollution at the household and national level (2) loss of farmland and productive soils, including soil quality degradation (3) loss of natural wetlands, primary forest area and other at-risk ecosystems (4) high amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions (5) depletion of the ozone layer (6) depletion of nonrenewable sources of energy.
Unfortunately, it’s not likely that GPI will get out of committee in the House of Representatives for several obvious reasons: If the costs listed in GPI were adapted to GDP, actual reported GDP would be all minuses, like -5% to -25%, not +2% to +6%.
Oops! How would the Dow Jones Industrial Average react? Most likely, it would go haywire, directionless, out of control, similar to many ecosystems of the planet that have gone haywire, like the Amazon Rainforest (alarmingly becoming a carbon emitter instead of a carbon sink) or the Great Barrier Reef (>50% of corals bleached in only 5 years) or Siberian permafrost (biggest fires ever recorded) or the Arctic (tragic loss of world’s biggest reflector of solar radiation) or Greenland (big super meltdown underway) or Antarctica (glacial ice flow accelerating way beyond expectations) or the 2/3rds loss of wild vertebrates in less than 50 years.
So, yes Representative Omar’s GPI bill is an excellent idea, but it will likely fail because only size matters in America, and America’s GDP proves it by ignoring reality: (1) pollution costs ignored (2) loss of crucial farmland (3) toxic poisoning (pesticides) of soil (4) monoculture artificial fertilized crop soil degradation (5) paved wetlands destroy “kidneys of the planet” (6) excessive greenhouse gases (the US emits 28% of world emissions with only 5% of world population) (6) subsidizing depletion of nonrenewable sources of energy.
It’s little wonder that the planet is regurgitating a sickness that is endemic to anthropogenic influence throughout the biosphere with raging fires, destructive flooding, and killer heat waves.
Alas, focus on GDP will never heal a broken planet.
GDP does not calculate its own costs of infinite growth. It cannot because the calculation would be negative every year. And, in an act of absolute absurdity, GDP is measured quarterly, as are corporate profits. So, every three-month performance is meaningful, which is insane, childish, and flat-out stupid. This “hurry up and report the quarter” dicta resembles a shell game. In contrast, ecosystems require a lot of time, much longer than three months. Nature doesn’t compute by the quarter. Conversely, GDP is in such a hurry.
Ilhan’s proposal for GPI is geared to a society that values sustainability of resources and concern for the health of the biosphere and for its inhabitants. But, sad to say, it doesn’t realistically fit into today’s world of neoliberal capitalism. There’s no open slot for anything other than profits. We all pay a price for those profits.
Moreover, it is doubtful that an accurate calculation of depletion and destruction of ecosystems is possible at today’s rapid rate. Who could possibly keep up with it?
Still, it’s brilliant to get the concept into the public domain, and one can only hope.
The world is on fire like never before: “Wildfires Have Erupted Across the Globe Scorching Places That Rarely Burned Before” (CNN headlines July 22, 2021) but not only is fire raging, Biblical floods are destroying entire communities; e.g., 9,000 homes swept away in central China (BBC News) as towns were nearly decimated in Germany, “Europe’s Deadly Floods Leave Scientists Stunned” (Science, July 20, 2021). All of that with worldwide droughts at a fever pitch.
Is the sky (actually) falling?
According to SPEI Global Drought Monitor, the current drought cycle is worldwide. Only Antarctica is spared. In some corners of the world water reservoirs are dangerously low, big hydroelectric plants sputter, as long-standing verdant forests morph into dried-out firetraps.
This shocking coincidence of three major catastrophic events hitting at the same time is likely unequaled in modern history. Why are the most serious threats to 21st century civilization; i.e., drought, fire, and floods simultaneously ravaging the planet from east-to-west, north-to-south?
Answers can be found in a new book: Drought, Flood, Fire, How Climate Change Contributes to Catastrophes by Chris Funk (Director of Climate Hazards Center, UC Santa Barbara) Cambridge University Press, August 2021.
Funk provides a very accurate description of the linchpin of climate-related trouble in one brilliant paragraph:
We hang isolated in space, with only an incredibly thin layer of atmosphere standing between us and oblivion. If we could drive our car straight up at highway speeds, we would approach the edge of the atmosphere in a matter of minutes. And into this thin membrane we are dumping about 28 million gigatons of carbon dioxide every day. The rational decisions of nearly 8 billion people are resulting in collective insanity as we choose to destroy the delicate balances that support Earth’s fragile flame. (p. 21)
Moreover:
Climate change is making climate extremes more frequent and intense… Not in the future, but right now… Over the past few years (2015-2020) the fingerprints of climate change have seemed more like a slap. Extreme heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires have exacted a terrible toll on developed and developing nations alike. These extremes have impacted hundreds of millions of people and resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in losses, all across the globe. (p. 5)
Early on in Funk’s book a chart of weather-related losses (1980 to 2018) clearly shows a four-fold increase in less than 40 years, which is foreboding and demanding of attention. Funk educates readers how and why such huge increases have occurred in such a short time:
One goal of this book is to describe how energy moves through the Earth’s energy system, so you can both better appreciate the beauty of our life-sustaining complex planet, and how human-induced warming is altering this system in a dangerous and alarming way. (p. 12)
Drought Flood Fire delves into the onset of complex life, as well as the rudimentary basics of the mechanisms by which greenhouse gases warm the planet, to wit:
Even most people who believe in climate change don’t really understand the basic mechanism of why adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere has to increase the amount of energy reaching the surface of the Earth. (p. 65)
This book serves as a tutorial and, as such, a compelling asset for students and advocates and world policymakers. It’s an authoritative teaching tool with occasional fun images that depict the ironic fragility of our enduring planet, e.g.,
Imagine an egg painted blue. The atmosphere is as thick as the blue paint. (p. 67)
Ever wonder how tropical storms originate or hurricanes or cyclones via understanding the intricate details behind the reported facts, in plain English?
Is Earth uniquely fragile or steadfast and how is it that humans disrupt its ecosystems?
Indeed, Drought, Flood, Fire is a primer on the most elemental developments of all aspects of the universe and solar system and the origin of complex life itself. This seminal book is essentially a lecture series about the remarkable features and development of the universe ultimately devolving into today’s anthropogenic distortion of nature. It’s well worth the read.
Funk personally describes his approach, as follows:
Some aspects of climate change are complex and hard to fathom. Some are fairly straightforward concepts and facts that everyone really needs to understand. This book is mostly about the latter. Some of the most important mechanisms of climate change can be understood by everyone: Why do greenhouse gasses have such a direct warming effect on our planet? How does this warming intensify the impact of droughts and fires? How can this same atmospheric warming, paradoxically, also increase the frequency of extreme precipitation events and floods? This book approaches these questions with a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) attitude. (p. 59)
He explains the dynamics of extreme events, as for example, the interrelationship of California fires, warmer air temperatures, and drier vegetation like the infamous Thomas Fire of 2017, which was for a brief period the biggest most damaging fire in California history with flames roaring six stories into the sky.
Interestingly enough, along with that California example, Funk spells out warning signals for all of humanity, to wit:
By looking carefully at both weather data and disaster statistics, we can see with our own eyes that a 1°C warming is already having dire consequences. (p. 64)
That one fact alone “dire consequences” at only 1°C, especially in the context of a world currently at 1.2°C above baseline, should alert policymakers around the world to the inescapable gravity of today’s scenario with worldwide firestorms, floods, and droughts bordering on the apocalyptic, which are broadcasts on TV for all to see. These are unprecedented, out of control real time scenes of climate destructiveness never witnessed before. And, it’s happening around the world, and it’s happening now. It’s unvarnished reality!
According to Funk:
The intent here is serious. California just experienced a large increase in fire extent, due in part to an exceptional increase in temperatures. We will likely see this happen again, and again, over the next forty years. (p. 65)
Statements like that are backed up by scientific data that needs to be front and center for policymakers. His book should be on the desks of every policymaker because immediate remediation measures have never been more urgently crucial, especially with so much destruction at today’s global temperature of only 1.2°C above baseline. Whether they thoroughly read the book or not, policy wonks need a reminder of Drought Flood Fire on their desktops. It’s essential.
The rate of increase of global warming, as detailed in Funk’s book, sends a clear message of deep concern. Figure 5-3 in the book demonstrates “exceptionally warm” ocean and air temperatures throughout the planet. It’s the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s monthly temperature data set of sea surface and land temperatures. In true Michael Mann fashion the graph is parabolic!
The graph shows the fraction (percentage) of Earth that’s exceptionally warm over time, as explained by Funk:
This time series should deeply disturb you. The fraction… is increasing very rapidly. When I was born, it was about 2%. By the time I started graduate school it was around 5%. When my children were born, it hovered around 7%. Since that time the area of exceptional warmth has doubled again to around 17%, increasing rapidly just between the beginning and end of our focus period (2015-2019). Now almost one-fifth of the globe experiences extreme temperatures at any given time. (p. 99)
Those extremes result in severe health impacts, including death. For example, China has reported “at least 300 deaths” as a result of recent record-making floods whilst the same flooding traps passengers in subway trains standing in neck-deep water in the provincial capital Zhengzhou; meantime, hundreds of people died in the recent Pacific Northwest heat wave, according to estimates; there were at least 486 deaths in British Columbia, 116 in Oregon, 78 in Washington… there were more than 3,500 emergency department visits for heat-related illness this past May and June in a region that includes Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington State, which is normally a very cool region.
Funk’s research group has developed a methodology to provide accurate estimates of maximum air temperatures called the Climate Hazards Center Infrared Temperature dataset. His accomplishments at U of Calif. Santa Barbara involve satellites and computers used to identify and predict climate hazards. Because of the planet’s berserk climate system of late, Funk’s work should be mandatory for nation/state policy wonks.
Funk’s Extreme Event Attribution methodology identifies “the fingerprint of climate change” well ahead of time. For example, his research group explains the mechanisms or observations by which extreme weather events can be anticipated to help formulate humanitarian aid well ahead of a severe drought. As for example:
In late 2016 we predicted the spring 2017 drought that struck Kenya, Somalia, and southern Ethiopia. (p. 15)
According to Funk, we live on a “Goldilocks Planet” with a life support system entirely dependent upon a “very thin atmosphere and the absolute necessity of maintaining temperatures with a narrow range.” In that regard, Drought Flood Fire focuses on what’s happening to the planet now vis a vis extreme heat, extreme precipitation, and out of control droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes turbocharged by human-generated greenhouse gases.
Of interest, in spite of Funk’s careful examination of the dangers presented by human-generated greenhouse gases and examples of how devastating those have been at only 1°C above baseline, towards the end of his book he discovers an upbeat note by referencing the German and California experiences of effectively mitigating GHGs whilst experiencing rapid economic growth as examples of what the world can do to favorably resolve the climate crisis.
He goes on to tabulate all of the wonderful positives of modern day society, the accomplishments in medicine, science, etc., which are all true. Yet, it somehow comes across as way too Disneylandish in the face of repeated failures by the nations of the world to uphold their climate mitigation commitments. After all, every world climate conference, like Paris 2015, has failed, horribly failed. This is worse than a tragedy and cause for not holding one’s breath over the outcome of the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference to be held in Glasgow in November called COP26 where 30,000 delegates are expected.
Yes, since 1995 in Berlin, the world has already held 25 COPs! Begging the question: What results? Namely, annual CO2 emissions have skyrocketed (double the 20th century rate), unrelenting global warming (a new heat record, 2020) CO2-e at record levels year-by-year. Meanwhile, Biblical fires, massive flooding, and killer droughts haunt civilization like never before.
What’s to celebrate?
Maybe it would be better if COP26 is cancelled and save the millions spent on 30,000 professionals gathering to chitchat, meaning “lots of smoke but no flames,” except for the long-standing forests of the world, which are burning like crazy.
At the end, Funk comes back to reality, which is crucial for understanding where the planet’s health stands and what must be done, to wit:
Right now we appear to be headed for 3°C of warming or more. This level of warming would almost certainly have catastrophic and potentially irreversible impacts on our planet’s life support system. (p. 299)
But, according to Drought Flood Fire, it’s already happening with just 1°C warming, as Funk additionally queries: Imagine +3°C or +4°C bringing on decimated crops, super storms, and considerably higher sea levels, but yet:
Even the difference between 1.5°C and 2°C of warming will make an incredible difference. (p. 300)
Nobody knows for certain where climate change/global warming is headed, but one thing is certain, it’s always worse than climate models; it’s always worse than scientists expect. That’s a concerning preamble to yet one more UN Climate Summit.
All of which gives one pause with today’s 1.2°C above baseline as Biblical droughts, floods, and fires scare the daylights out of scientists. They’re publicly admitting it, which is a refreshing bold approach. Hopefully, their deep-seated concerns override, supersede the bureaucratic nightmarish results of past COPs.
Meanwhile, Drought Flood Fire, How Climate Change Contributes to Catastrophes puts everything into perspective.
In the newly coined so-called War on Covid, the arsenal is eclectic. There is not only science, in the form of experimental RNA vaccines hastily developed by giants of the pharmaceutical industry, but also semi-authoritarian or full-blown authoritarian government measures imposed and legally validated by declarations of states of emergencies. The panoply of edicts include mandatory face masks indoor and sometime outdoor, depending on the country; enforced or unenforced social distancing recommendations; limitation of public or even private gatherings; and more drastic measures like lock-downs and curfews.
The crescendo of assaults on personal liberties eased up for a few months, but governments are now using, because of the spread of the Delta variant, the threats of reinstating their coercion as an insidious blackmail to force people to get vaccinated. In other words, if one has the temerity to refuse the salvation brought by Big Pharma’s vaccines, life shall be so extremely problematic and isolated as almost to make one a social pariah. In France President Macron is defining a new ideology that could be called semi-authoritarian neoliberalism, while in the Philippines neofascist Duarte is entirely blunt in his approach. Regardless, both politicians have the same goal: to get their entire population vaccinated. They use a strategy of psychological warfare based on reward and punishment, a bit similar to that used on lab mice.
In the case of Macron, the reward for the good and fully vaccinated French citizens is that they will carry, as a badge of honor, a Pass Sanitaire. The misfits, refuseniks, pesky bad citizens who still refuse to see the light and comply, will receive punishments. These bad French apples will be deprived from travel except in their own vehicles, and from cultural events like concerts, movies and museum exhibits.
Duarte’s fascist approach, if more brutal, is in a sense a bit more honest. It is still about manipulating his population with the rewards versus punishments principle, but there are many sticks and basically no carrots. Case in point: Duarte is seriously considering locking up in their homes those Filipinos who refuse to be vaccinated. One can only wonder what will happen to the vast homeless population in the Philippines.
Covid management styles and policies have been diverse in tone and strategies, but it seems that governments worldwide are all watching, then mimicking, at times, each other’s minor achievements to avoid major failures. Only one question is on their minds, which seems to be the universal governmental panacea, independently of ideology: how do we get the entire population vaccinated?
In the more sophisticated media manipulation of Western democracies, the secondary questions are as follows. How do we convince the citizenry that the coercive measures put in place nearly 18 months ago, in a quasi entirely undemocratic fashion by decrees etc., were gently forced on people for their own good rather than in an attempt to avoid a global economic collapse? And further, how do we persuade them that these measures will be entirely lifted one day to go back to an almost mythological happy pre-Covid world?
In other words, how can leaders, with varying degrees of incompetence and undisclosed ties to giant global corporate interests, make people believe that they are acting for the common good rather than to avoid a global stock market crash? Altruism and the collective social good rarely guide the paths of politicians anywhere, and citizens in large numbers have finally caught on to this reality.
People have become more doubtful about what they are told, either directly by their elected officials, or through mainstream media outlets via so-called experts charged with propagating — yes, like propaganda — the government narrative with powerful bullhorns, and sort of carpet-bombing people’s brains with a relentless coverage of the immense danger of Covid, especially the brand new Delta variant, and the great virtue of vaccines as being almost 92 percent accurate silver bullets against the pandemic.
Unfortunately, a one-note intrusive narrative eventually has an undesired effect on a fragment of the population. This is precisely what is going on in France since Macron made the choice, which could be fatal to his political future, to jam through parliament, in the middle of the summer holidays, a law infamously called Pass Sanitaire, to blackmail French people into mandatory vaccination. Many opponents perceive it as a pass to submission, and they have decided to make their voices heard, loud and clear, in the streets. Will this movement of dissent be long lived, contagious to other countries, or ultimately twisted and hijacked for a political purpose? This is so far a question in limbo. The large scale protests, however, were unexpected.
A year ago the Covid-19 pandemic accounted for about 75 percent of the media coverage across the board worldwide. This alone, if a virus could have been granted the Person of the Year award from Time Magazine, would have assured it the coveted price. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won person of the year in 2020, but if it had been Creature of the Year, SARS-CoV-2 would have won. As matter of fact, one can easily argue that without the Covid crisis, Donald Trump would have likely been reelected. In political, sociological, and economic affairs, the microorganism has been a game changer.
So far, Covid has not been a seed of much needed social change but instead has been used as a nasty new tool for disaster capitalism to thrive by changing some fundamental economic parameters, as well as serve as a powerful device to concentrate wealth. What could be better for capitalism than to convince taxpayers that their money needs to be injected by the trillions into corporate conglomerates? Across the world, in all the COVID-19 stimulus funding schemes, the lion share went to corporations while private citizens got the crumbs. Wall Street should have crashed but didn’t, because vast amounts of public funds were pumped into the global financial markets. Airlines that were saved from bankruptcy by a Covid bail out should have been nationalized; instead Air France, for example, remained a private company with an overpaid CEO while France’s government became a bigger share holder.
The bait and switch worked on a global scale. It worked with the financial aspect, just like it worked in the semantic of fear. For the media, it’s all about key words. Some might have noticed that at first it was COVID-19, then it became simply Covid, but now, probably because the word’s traction is wearing off, governments or corporate-controlled outlets have switched to Delta variant. It is today’s winner in the fear factor department, and it is repeated ad nauseam. This element of constant fear has established a nice level of docility in a majority of the global population, as well as a numbing anxiety focused on the narrow topic of the pandemic, and the easy vaccine fix proposed by governments.
The cloud of anxiety has obstructed from many the clarity that WE, as a species, face a threat much greater than a virus. How gullible many of us might be to believe that a pandemic, which so far has killed a quarter of the number of victims of the Spanish flu 100 years ago, is more of an existential threat than the unfolding climate collapse? It is pathetic and ironic for governments and their media servants to use a pandemic as a smoke screen for a much bigger problem, especially when a substantial potion of Earth is currently being consumed by fires.
Last time I checked, 800 wild fires were burning in Italy, Turkey was scorched, the US northwest was still burning, Greece was baking with a 45 degree Celsius temperature, Siberia had been burning for months, and there were killer floods in Germany and China. Meanwhile, the so-called climate experts on mainstream media hardly connected these climate crisis events. They barely connected the dots between extreme weather events and catastrophic climate change by softly saying “isolated extreme weather events could be a manifestation of global climate change.” It shouldn’t be “could be” but are; it shouldn’t be “climate change” but climate crisis. The global fear of Covid is highly lucrative. By contrast a fear of climate collapse — or actually a recognition of its imminence — would lead people to reject the global capitalist system that is driving our species into the abyss. It would lead human societies away from consumption and toward zero-growth economies and population models that would deal capitalism a fatal blow.
We have more or less collectively experienced, since March 2020, a life of fear and a sort of lingering collective anxiety. Fear is usually correlated with a reduction of critical thinking and greatly diminished opposition against the abuse of authority.
The protests in France show that fear can lose ground. Citizens do not have to surrender their fundamental rights of freedom and liberty to the whim of governmental authority based on semi-valid cognitive notions, or purely arbitrary ones, at times absurd, which appear to serve an agenda foreign to the common good. Popular resistance, whatever forms it may take in France and elsewhere, is always a viable option. At critical times in history it even becomes a civic duty.
Amnesty says security forces used live ammunition on protesters while officials blame ‘opportunists’
Iran is using unlawful and excessive force in a crackdown against protests over water shortages in its oil-rich but arid southwestern Khuzestan province, according to international rights groups.
Amnesty International said it had confirmed the deaths of at least eight protesters and bystanders, including a teenage boy, after the authorities used live ammunition to quell the protests.
The village of Lytton, British Colombia, just northeast of Vancouver, saw temperatures on Sunday top 116 degrees. The roads are buckling in Portland, Oregon, under the onslaught of the heat, and the power cables on their streetcars are melting. The historic temperature spike is being caused by a “heat dome” above the affected region, meteorologists say, a confluence of events so rare they only come together every 1,000 years or so. Thanks to anthropogenic climate disruption — a fancy way of saying “humans did this” — these thousand-year events are becoming annual calamities.
“One of the primary reasons I moved to the Pacific Northwest was because of what I knew was coming in the climate crisis,” Dahr Jamail, who reported on climate for many years for Truthout, told me on Tuesday. Jamail lives in a small town in Washington State. “I’d done my research. I knew the projections for potable water availability, temperature spikes, arable land availability and where the climate impacts would be the mildest. For all of those, and more, the Pacific Northwest was one of the best places to live in the contiguous 48 states.”
However, Jamail noted, even since moving to Washington several years ago, he’s seen marked climate shifts.
“Where I live on the north coast of the Olympic Peninsula, it was 97 yesterday,” continued Jamail. “The day before it was almost as hot. The concrete slab upon which my home stands was the only cool spot. By the early afternoon, I was lying on it face down for respite. Across the water in Seattle, the Emerald City had never seen 100 degrees. Yesterday was the third time in the last three days it saw triple digits, and it was still 90 degrees at 8pm. All this, when less than a year ago, this region had the worst air quality in the world for days on end as we were engulfed in wildfire smoke blowing in from California.”
This is it. This is here. This is now. Even the safest places provide no safety. The theoretical has become actual; we have crossed the threshold into the unmistakable consequences of our horrid stewardship of this ridiculously precious planet and its ecosystems.
The western U.S. appears to be caught in a positive climate feedback loop, though there is little objectively positive about it. A “feedback loop” from the perspective of climate change “is the equivalent of a vicious or virtuous circle — something that accelerates or decelerates a warming trend,” according to a BBC climate report from earlier this year. “A positive feedback accelerates a temperature rise, whereas a negative feedback decelerates it.”
One example of a current and ongoing positive feedback loop is taking place in the Siberian tundra. Human-caused warming has led to the melting of the Siberian permafrost, which in turn has led to the release of billions of tons of methane out of the ground and into the atmosphere. Methane is a warming accelerant, one of the most dangerous kinds we are dealing with. When it gets dumped into the air in such quantities, warming is accelerated, more permafrost melts, more methane is released, warming is further accelerated, etc.
The feedback loop out west — human-caused warming leading to a massive drought which exacerbates warming, etc. — has come to include the current heat dome phenomenon. Put bluntly, the dome is making every other climate-related impact worse, and the potential consequences go far beyond the dangers posed by high heat to human health.
People out west are sitting in deep dread of the looming fire season, which could be worse than any we have seen. The drought has worsened, and the snow pack in the mountains — a vital feeder to the water table — is all but gone. With the arrival of the heat dome, much of the region is a bomb waiting to go off.
If the fire season this year is as bad or worse than expected, the next domino to fall in the effects of climate disruption will be potable water, which makes all this nothing less than an existential national emergency. From The New York Times:
When wildfires blaze across the West, as they have with increasing ferocity as the region has warmed, the focus is often on the immediate devastation — forests destroyed, infrastructure damaged, homes burned, lives lost. But about two-thirds of drinking water in the United States originates in forests. And when wildfires affect watersheds, cities can face a different kind of impact, long after the flames are out.
In Colorado’s Front Range, erosion from fire-damaged slopes during the summer rains could turn the flow of the Poudre and its tributaries dark with sediment, dissolved nutrients and heavy metals, as well as debris. This could clog intake pipes, reduce the capacity of reservoirs, cause algal blooms and cloud and contaminate the water, sharply raising maintenance and treatment costs. In the worst case, the water would be untreatable, forcing the cities to use alternate supplies for a time.
As climate change helps make wildfires burn hotter and longer, the risks to water supplies grow. But most people don’t think about the risks, said Kevin Bladon, a hydrologist at Oregon State University, even after a damaging fire. “Here we are in 2021,” he said. “We’re really removed from the 2020 wildfire season. Most people are thinking the problems are over.”
(Emphasis added.)
“The runaway feedback loops of the climate crisis are in full swing,” notes Jamail. “Most of the unraveling is occurring at a pace far more accelerated than the worst-case projections of our climate models. That wildfires are scorching millions of acres every year at a record pace should not come as a surprise. Nor should the impact of this on human water supplies. But what will likely come as a surprise to most will be the abrupt panic when the prices of food and potable water spike, or when the place where they live finally becomes unlivable for lack of water.”
The future is hot. The future is dry. The future is on fire. The future is now.
The western states have been stuck in a blast furnace of hot weather as spring transitions to summer. Record-breaking heat, drought and extreme stress to power grids have almost half the country in deep distress. The last couple of days have seen a small reprieve, but that’s about to end.
“The National Weather Service is warning of a ‘Record-Breaking and Dangerous Heatwave’ hitting this weekend and early next week,” reports Brian Kahn for Gizmodo. “Weather models are also coalescing around blistering heat. If the forecasts come to fruition, we’re not just talking about a few daily records falling here and there. We’re talking about a heat wave for the ages that could absolutely destroy all-time records from Washington to California as well as parts of Canada.”
According to a terrifying, massive and excruciatingly detailed report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which was obtained by Agence France-Presse (AFP), what is happening out west is not a meteorological fluke, but a hard look at the immediate future of the planet. “Species extinction, more widespread disease, unlivable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas — these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30,” reports AFP.
By far the most comprehensive catalogue ever assembled of how climate change is upending our world, the report reads like a 4,000-page indictment of humanity’s stewardship of the planet. But the document, designed to influence critical policy decisions, is not scheduled for release until February 2022 — too late for crunch UN summits this year on climate, biodiversity and food systems, some scientists say.
The challenges it highlights are systemic, woven into the very fabric of daily life. They are also deeply unfair: those least responsible for global warming will suffer disproportionately, the report makes clear. And it shows that even as we spew record amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we are undermining the capacity of forests and oceans to absorb them, turning our greatest natural allies in the fight against warming into enemies.
It warns that previous major climate shocks dramatically altered the environment and wiped out most species, raising the question of whether humanity is sowing the seeds of its own demise. “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems,” it says. “Humans cannot.”
Beyond the dire warnings contained in the report, the assessment of current efforts to curtail climate disruption is damning. One example offered is the 2015 Paris Agreement, which seeks to limit global warming to a 1.5 degree Celsius increase — two degrees at most. This was based on the assumption that the Earth would not warm that much before the year 2100. According to the data included in the report, “On current trends, we’re heading for three degrees Celsius at best…. Last month, the World Meteorological Organization projected a 40 percent chance that Earth will cross the 1.5-degree threshold for at least one year by 2026.”
In other words, nearly every idea floated by governments to address climate disruption is woefully insufficient and out of date. “Current levels of adaptation will be inadequate to respond to future climate risks,” reads the IPCC report. Billions face the threat of coastal destruction, drought, famine, fire and plague … not after 2100, but today, tomorrow and the day after that.
All of this is already happening, and much of it cannot be stopped. This is no longer a theoretical exercise to solve a problem that is 80 years away. This is now.
One immediate example is the drought-ridden west, and the massive conflagrations caused by the high heat and dry air. “When wildfires blaze across the West, as they have with increasing ferocity as the region has warmed, the focus is often on the immediate devastation — forests destroyed, infrastructure damaged, homes burned, lives lost,” reportsThe New York Times. “But about two-thirds of drinking water in the United States originates in forests. And when wildfires affect watersheds, cities can face a different kind of impact, long after the flames are out.”
While the report takes a dim view of current efforts to curtail climate disruption, its message is not entirely pessimistic. Much of the damage to come is already baked into the situation, yet areas of significant mitigation are possible — but only if action is taken immediately.
“There is very little good news in the report,” reads the AFP dispatch, “but the IPCC stresses that much can be done to avoid worst-case scenarios and prepare for impacts that can no longer be averted…. But simply swapping a gas guzzler for a Tesla or planting billions of trees to offset business-as-usual isn’t going to cut it, the report warns.”
“We need transformational change operating on processes and behaviours at all levels: individual, communities, business, institutions and governments,” reads the IPCC report. “We must redefine our way of life and consumption.”
Is the United States capable of such a radical transformation? We can’t get people to wear masks in order to save their own lives and the lives of their loved ones, there are millions of dollars to be made lying to a large segment of the population about issues like climate disruption, and our governing bodies cannot summon the necessary majority to fix a pothole.
Our capitalism is driving everything that is murdering the planet — oil, war, consumption — and that capitalism has powerful defenders.
If the western U.S. goes up in flames like an untended tinderbox and California’s huge economy is derailed, if another major city like New Orleans is devoured by a climate storm, if the United States sees a sharp uptick in displaced climate refugees fleeing for their lives, maybe Mitch McConnell will forego the filibuster and let a solution come to a vote, but I am not holding my breath.
I always wince when I hear someone say we are “destroying the planet.” The planet is just fine, thank you very much, 4 billion years and counting, and we humans are to this space-bound orb what amounts to an annoying summer cold. “Next up,” Earth appears prepared to announce. “Let’s see if another species can do better in a few million years. Pardon the mess; the last tenants were real assholes.”
For our own sake, for the sake of all life, and in the name of simple enlightened self-interest, we need to change everything about how we exist as creatures on this planet, and we need to do it now.
As lawmakers in Washington continue to negotiate over an infrastructure bill that Democrats say needs to include major new funding to address the climate crisis, much of the U.S. is experiencing record heat, with many western states seeing record temperatures, drought and water shortages. “The climate crisis is here now,” says climate and energy researcher Leah Stokes, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “The climate crisis is really happening right now, and every single year we delay on passing a climate bill, the worse the crisis gets.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
President Joe Biden is planning to meet with lawmakers in a push to reach a bipartisan agreement on a new infrastructure plan. The group of 10 Republican and Democratic senators recently proposed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, but many Democrats have criticized the deal for not doing enough to address the climate crisis, among other issues. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are considering a $6 trillion package that could be passed through the reconciliation process if all 50 Democrats agree to vote for it.
The debate over infrastructure and combating the climate emergency comes as western states are facing daily reminders of the crisis, including drought, water shortages and extreme heat. Many cities have already broken all-time heat records even though it’s still June. Last week, Phoenix recorded five days in a row of temperatures over 115 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time ever. Santa Fe, New Mexico, tied its all-time high of 102 degrees Fahrenheit. Forecasters are predicting it could hit 110 degrees next week in Portland, Oregon. About 26% of the West is experiencing exceptional drought. Water levels at Lake Mead have dropped to their lowest levels ever recorded.
We’re joined right now by Leah Stokes. She’s an assistant professor of political science at University of California, Santa Barbara, researcher on climate and energy policy. She’s the author of Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States.
Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, Professor Stokes. So, talk about the desperate situation, the drought in the West, and how that links, very practically, to this debate over infrastructure spending.
LEAHSTOKES: Well, I think you talked about it at the top of the segment here. You know, the reality is, it’s not just the West that’s in a debate. It’s really about half of the entire country that is facing really a historic drought. Scientists are saying that in some parts of the West they’re seeing a drought that’s worse than we’ve seen in, you know, something like four centuries.
So, the fact is that the climate crisis is here now. The drought, the heat waves that you talked about, setting record temperatures all across the western United States, and really even reaching into parts of the Midwest, these are the signatures of climate change. And the fact is that the climate crisis is on our doorstep.
And the question is: What are we going to do about it? Are we going to continue to talk about having infrastructure day or infrastructure week for another four years, or are we actually going to see Congress act and pass a bold climate package this summer?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Professor, you’ve said that the Biden administration and the Senate and House Democrats are committed to true climate action. But how do you see this playing out, given the clear Republican resistance? What do you think is doable? And of the stuff that’s not doable, what kind of public pressure needs to come on Washington to get it done?
LEAHSTOKES: Well, I think you’re right that we need to keep the public pressure up. I noticed at the top of the hour you talked about Sunrise’s marches, which have been happening in both California and across the Gulf Coast. You know, there have been lots of actions, whether that’s against Line 3 or for these kinds of infrastructure negotiations, that have been trying to raise awareness of lawmakers of just how urgent the climate crisis is. And we really need to keep that up.
And the good news is that just a week or two ago, a group of senators — we have over 12 senators at this point now — have said, in the line of Senator Markey, “No climate, no deal,” meaning that if there is not climate change in the package that moves forward this summer, they’re not going to move a package forward this summer. And I think that’s really shaken free the negotiations in Congress, because what we’re now seeing is that Majority Leader Schumer is saying, “OK, we can have a two-track process. We can continue along with this bipartisan idea that’s been going on for several months now, and we can finally start the budget reconciliation process for the broader infrastructure package that Senator Sanders is helping to lead.” So I think that we’re starting to see this two-track process develop. But the fundamental thing that’s part of this process is “No climate, no deal.” We have to have a bold climate package, that’s happening through the budget reconciliation process, pass this summer.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, the president has already sharply reduced his initial proposal on infrastructure. What’s in the bipartisan policy package now, and what’s been excluded so far?
LEAHSTOKES: Well, we don’t actually know a lot of what is in the bipartisan policy package. There was a two-pager that came out a couple days ago, and it said that there would be about $600 billion in new spending, so things like, overwhelmingly, roads and bridges and sort of that kind of infrastructure. There was some more hopeful things, though, because previous Republican proposals have included, for example, zero dollars for the power grid, while this proposal included about $73 billion for the power grid. There’s also significant investments in public transit. So, you know, there are decent ideas in this bipartisan approach, but it is not a substitute for a climate bill at the scale that’s necessary.
And there’s also been questions raised about some of the pay-fors for this Republican bill. For example, they’ve been talking about putting taxes on electric vehicles — the exact opposite thing one should be doing right now. And Senator Sanders, in particular, has said that he is not interested in a proposal that does that, nor is President Biden, who campaigned on saying that he would not raise taxes for anybody making $400,000 or less. So, the pay-fors in the bipartisan approach are really lacking right now. They include things like repurposing COVID bills — sorry, COVID funds, which probably need to be spent on COVID. So, I think we need a little bit more details. And it’s clear that this bipartisan group is trying to work to figure out exactly what their plan is to pay for this new spending.
AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk more about the climate crisis in the West — I mean, we live in information silos that are determined in all different ways, including geographically — and for people to understand the significance of what’s happening, throughout Arizona, California and beyond?
LEAHSTOKES: Absolutely. You know, I’ve only lived in California since 2015, and the droughts and fires and heat waves that I have experienced in that short time are really unprecedented. You know, I lived through the Thomas Fire, which was then the largest fire in modern California history. And there’s been information going around lately that that’s actually now the seventh-largest fire, and that only took place in 2017.
So, a lot of people in the western United States are just experiencing year after year of extreme heat waves, extreme drought, extreme fires, that we’ve really never seen before. This is why scientists are beginning to talk about things like megadroughts and megafires and mega-heat waves, these huge-scale events that don’t just span the western United States but go all the way to the Midwest, with record temperatures happening in June and then another record event likely to happen next week. It’s only June. Normally these kinds of extreme heat waves come in August. And we know from climate scientists that this is climate change, that heat waves are more than twice as likely to be happening because of climate change. And that’s from science that’s a few years old. I’m sure scientists are looking at what we’re seeing right now; they’re even more alarmed.
So, the climate crisis is really happening right now, and every single year we delay on passing a climate bill, the worse the crisis gets. Folks may remember that over a decade ago we tried to pass a climate bill, the Waxman-Markey bill. It failed in the Senate. And we have already had the president propose this American Jobs Plan at the end of March, and we have been waiting for almost three months to see Congress act. And while we wait, we see climate change happening all across the United States.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Professor Stokes, I wanted to ask you about the state roles in addressing the climate crisis. We are seeing reports all around the country now that state governments have more cash and more surplus than they’ve ever had in their histories, as a result of rebounding tax revenues and also federal assistance. California, New York, New Jersey, all these states have more money to spend this year than they’ve ever had before. And I’m wondering what your sense is of what states could be doing to direct some of those funds, since this is basically a one-shot situation for this year, perhaps next year, in terms of being able to address climate change at the state level?
LEAHSTOKES: That’s a great question. You know, the great thing about acting on climate change is that it is an investment. When we’re talking about infrastructure, when we’re talking about one-time spending, it’s actually spending that pays itself back, both through the infrastructure itself as well as through job creation, all kinds of things throughout the economy. So, I think that you’re right that governors should be looking at spending money on climate change, building, for example, clean energy, helping to build more public transit and support that infrastructure, because if you put the money in at time one, it can actually pay you back over many years.
So, I do think that the states have an important role to play. But the federal government really has the power of the purse. And we’re not talking about sort of a one-time surplus. We’re talking about spending trillions of dollars on the climate crisis. And that is really just a down payment on the scale of the crisis. So, I think that we can’t sort of look away from the federal government. We have to see them act alongside states.
AMYGOODMAN: Can you, finally, talk about the report that you just co-authored with the Sierra Club, Professor Stokes, called “The Dirty Truth About Utility Climate Pledges,” looking at greenwashing by utility companies?
LEAHSTOKES: Absolutely. So, several months ago, I worked with the Sierra Club to research: What are utilities planning to do? And they put out a lot of corporate pledges, saying that they wanted to decarbonize by, let’s say, 2050. But we compared those pledges to their actual investment behavior, to their proposals that they make about what they’d like to build. And the fact is, across this country we have about 230 fossil gas plants currently proposed. If those plants were built, it would be absolutely devastating for the climate crisis. And so, on the one hand, we have utilities saying, “Yes, we want to clean up. We want to address climate change,” but, on the other hand, we have them proposing massive amounts of fossil infrastructure.
And so, how do we reconcile these two things? Well, we have to recognize that if we really want to clean up our infrastructure, we need to have federal legislation, specifically a federal clean electricity standard. President Biden campaigned and won on a plan for 100% clean power by 2035. And it’s clear that there’s a lot of support from some utilities, as well as within Congress, to pass a clean electricity standard that would target 80% clean power by 2030.
And I wrote another report with Evergreen Action and Data for Progress which looked at how exactly we can do that as part of the budget reconciliation process. So, if we really want to get on top of the climate crisis, the power sector is the most important place to start, because if we have clean electricity, like 80% clean power by 2030, because of this clean electricity standard, and we combine that with electrification — things like electric vehicles, electric stoves and heat pumps — we can actually decarbonize about 75% of our economy. And when we talk about President Biden’s goal of cutting emissions by 50% by 2030, if we have that clean electricity standard and we pass that through Congress — we go to 80% clean by 2030 — the fact is we’d be more than halfway to meeting the president’s goal of cutting emissions by 50% by 2030.
So, really, there’s no substitute for laws, unfortunately. It’s one thing for utilities to say they’d like to do things, but we actually need legislation to make sure they do things. And that legislation at the federal level can actually be an investment to help them do things and to help them get on track with the pledges that they claim that they want to fulfill.
AMYGOODMAN: Leah Stokes, we want to thank you so much for being with us, assistant professor of political science at University of California, Santa Barbara, researcher on climate and energy policy, author of Short Circuiting Policy, also co-host of the podcastA Matter of Degrees. She is also on the advisory board at Evergreen Action.
Next up, striking coal miners from Alabama are here in New York to protest on Wall Street. The miners have been on strike since April. Stay with us.
No country is immune from water scarcity issues — not even the world’s wealthiest country, the United States.
The southwestern states, in particular, have faced frequent and ongoing droughts over the past two decades, and traditional water supplies are failing. As groundwater supplies in the region have depleted substantially, rainfall has decreased and the costs of importing water have risen substantially.
The region looks to the Colorado River as its plumbing system, which currently provides drinking water to 1 in 10 Americans — all while irrigating nearly 5.5 million acres of land. But it’s also being stretched to its limits: Population growth and expansive development are increasing agricultural demands. Meanwhile, the pressure to ensure that there is sufficient water left in the environment to support ecosystems has accelerated. According to a study by the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation, the demands on the Colorado River are expected to exceed supply by 2040.
On top of this, each state has vastly different needs. For example, Nevada’s needs are largely urban, but Arizona and California require water for huge agricultural and urban sectors. Each year, states argue over who has the superior right to water supplies. And once they have their allocation, districts frequently end up in litigation over their allotment. There is always a shortage, raising questions over who is responsible and who must mitigate for it.
Of course, these variables can change year after year, and all planning is dictated by a largely unpredictable snowpack and, therefore, an increasingly erratic river flow. While demand is increasing, climate change has damaged supply — and the impact is two-fold, as less water comes down the Colorado River, people use more water due to increased temperatures.
Simply put, there is only so much water.
“When you can’t make the pie bigger and you’re fighting over a finite supply, it’s a misery index, just an allocation pain for all parties,” says Brad Herrema, a lawyer who specializes in water law and natural resources.
“But if you can make the pie bigger, there’s less fighting.”
Turning Wastewater Into a Resource
Our existing water supplies must go further, and the technology exists to make this happen — by turning wastewater into drinking water. This is not a new science, but the practice has evolved significantly in the past 50 years.
In the 1960s, water availability became problematic in rapidly growing areas in the U.S., and water managers began to consider using wastewater to augment supplies. A number of water reuse projects were built in the following decades in California, Virginia, Texas and Georgia, but larger developments in the 1990s were met with opposition. “Toilet to tap” narratives in the media fed misperceptions regarding the treatment process which helped to dismantle public support for these projects. What “toilet to tap” now misses are membrane filtration, membrane desalination, ozone and advanced oxidation, to name but a few treatment options that make the purified water entirely safe to drink.
But advances in these very technologies associated with water reuse helped boost confidence in and acceptance of the practice among water professionals in the early 2000s. Now, water reuse is entering the mainstream.
And according to a document by the Environmental Protection Agency and CDM Smith Inc., potable reuse also makes up “a significant portion” of the nation’s water supply once de facto reuse is factored in.
What’s clear is that some major U.S. cities are already delivering recycled wastewater to the consumer on a massive scale and making the pie larger.
How a city can recycle wastewater depends largely on the geography of the area, financial resources — and, perhaps most importantly, the attitudes of the public.
Las Vegas
Las Vegas recycles nearly all of its water used indoors, giving it a virtually inexhaustible supply of water for domestic consumption. The city benefits from its unique geography. Nearly 90 percent of southern Nevada’s water is taken from Lake Mead, which lies on the Colorado River. It is then treated and run through the city’s system. After it’s flushed or drained, the water makes its way to a wastewater treatment plant before it’s discharged into the Las Vegas Wash. From there it makes its way to Lake Mead where it is either drawn back out or stays in the river, ensuring there’s enough water for cities downstream of Vegas.
One key element that makes Vegas’s reuse system so effective is the Wash: a 12-mile-long channel that acts “as the ‘kidneys’ of the environment, cleaning the water that runs through … [it by] filtering out [any] harmful residues” on its way back to Lake Mead. Thanks to the Wash, when the water is withdrawn again, it does not need to go through a costly process of advanced treatment and, instead, undergoes just basic drinking water treatment.
Another key factor in Vegas’s success is that for every gallon of water Las Vegas puts into Lake Mead, it can take a gallon back out — meaning the city is essentially recycling its indoor water in a closed loop. This is known as de facto water reuse.
Nevada is allocated 300,000 AFY of water from the Colorado River each year. Bronson Mack, who oversees water resources and operations at Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA), says that in 2019, the city actually diverted 490,000 AFY of water from the Colorado River but only consumed 234,000 AFY. About 256,000 AFY was returned to the lake.
“Our return flow credits system is unique,” says Colby Pellegrino, director of the water resources department for SNWA. “Once we return the water to Lake Mead, we’re not charged for that water. We’re only charged for the total we depleted.”
Mack adds that local water utilities pay $313 for treatment and delivery of one AF of water, and pass that cost on to the consumer. If Vegas could not return such a large proportion of its water, that cost would rise dramatically.
De facto reuse is also vital for a city that can’t afford to gamble on the weather — Las Vegas is the driest city in the U.S. When the Colorado River ran at 40 percent of its usual capacity in 2002, the city was struck by drought, but its citizens still had unlimited access to indoor water.
“Vegas couldn’t exist without [the] return flow credits approach,” says Daniel Gerrity, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “Without that, we’d have already maxed out.”
This means the city’s major conservation efforts go into limiting outdoor use. And so, contrary to expectations, it is not the casinos that are the problem — but the local residents, who irrigate their gardens and wash their cars. After all, water lost to evaporation is water lost forever.
However, not every city has a Lake Mead or a Wash. For places without Vegas’s luck, there are other ways to do water reuse.
Orange County, California
Orange County Water District (OCWD) is a world leader in water reuse. Since 2008, it has provided drinking water to 2.5 million people — in a region with no more than 15 inches of annual rainfall — through its Groundwater Replenishment System (GWRS) project. This water would otherwise be discharged into the Pacific Ocean. By keeping it in the system, there is less reliance on the Colorado River, easing the strain on its supplies.
The city utilizes a process called indirect potable reuse (IPR). In the absence of an environmental filtration process like the Las Vegas Wash, Orange County’s wastewater has to undergo advanced treatment before it is pumped to a groundwater basin. From there, it is pumped to the consumer via a standard drinking water treatment train making it safe to consume and completing the cycle. The process not only turns wastewater back into a resource, but also saves massively on the cost of pumping Colorado River water from hundreds of miles away.
GWRS, which is a joint project of OCWD and the Orange County Sanitation District (OCSD), currently supplies north and central Orange County with 77 percent of its water supply, and it is expanding its wastewater treatment capacity from 100 to 130 million gallons per day by 2023. OCWD’s executive director of engineering and water resources, John Kennedy, says the expansion will save providers in Orange County over $6 million per year as there will be more water available to pump from the basin. Currently, he says, the other 23 percent of the water requirement of Orange County must be bought at approximately three times the price of reused water from another regional wholesaler — the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — that operates the Colorado River Aqueduct, which is a 242-mile water conveyance. And so, expanding the water reuse projects not only makes the pie bigger, but there’s also an economic incentive attached to it.
“Orange County is the benchmark [for] water reuse system,” says Gerrity.
Water managers from around the world visit OCWD to learn how they’ve managed such success.
Like so many regions innovating in water reuse, drought forced their hand. In 1975, as imported water supplies became less available, and another source of water was needed to fight seawater intrusion. In April 1975, OCWD unveiled a facility that took treated wastewater from the OCSD, blended it with deep well water and injected it into a basin. In 1977, OCWD became the first in the world to use reverse osmosis to purify wastewater to drinking water standards.
The project was expanded in line with the demand in the ‘90s, and the GWRS, which has been operational since 2008, is now the world’s largest advanced water purification system for potable use.
And through it all, OCWD managed to swerve the “toilet to tap” attacks that had ruined public support for such projects in other areas of California.
How?
“People expect to find out that our success is grounded in some secret technology, but they find out it’s all about education, education, education,” says Rob Thompson, the director of engineering at OCSD, which treats the water before sending it to the basin managed by OCWD. “Bringing the public on board with drinking [recycled] wastewater takes a lot of outreach. Getting over the ‘yuck factor’ is everything. We had to speak with NGOs, governors, the authorities, politicians — you name it, we spoke to them. Once you have enough people on board, everyone starts to think it must be okay.”
“People have high expectations about the quality of their water and have a lot of questions,” adds Megan Plumlee, who heads OCWD’s research and development department. “We explain to the public what we’re doing and how it’ll benefit the district, retailers and community.”
San Diego, currently embarking on a huge potable reuse project, followed OCWD’s lead when developing their project. Indeed, sometimes it takes a leader in the field for a new process to take hold, someone to show the way and prove something can be done safely, on a large scale.
“We weren’t the first to try it but we were the first to succeed on such a massive scale. That’s because we were the first to really embrace education. Now others are doing the same,” says Thompson.
Now, 14 states have developed regulations that allow for IPR, with several more IPR projects on the horizon that will help bolster water supplies — all without putting additional pressure on the Colorado River.
Another method of water reuse, which is more efficient, is yet to take hold in the U.S. — though it may be about to find its leader.
San Diego
Direct potable reuse (DPR) was labeled the final frontier of water reuse by Tracy Mehan, the executive director for government affairs at the American Water Works Association (AWWA), in an essay written for A Bigger Planet: Forty Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future. The process does away with an environmental buffer and pumps wastewater directly through an advanced treatment train before it is purified and put straight back into the system in a matter of hours.
Given this reality, DPR can deliver water more efficiently and cost-effectively by using existing infrastructure and without needing to build expensive and energy-intensive pipelines to a reservoir or groundwater basin. DPR can also allow for more water to be recycled than IPR as there are no limitations on the reservoir or groundwater basin.
Additionally, DPR avoids regulations on putting water back into the environment by eliminating the buffer. And finally, DPR can be more reliable and efficient: Jeff Mosher, vice president and principal technologist at Carollo Engineers, a leading firm in engineering water reuse systems, explains that DPR can turn wastewater into drinking water in a matter of hours, faster than IPR or any other method of reuse.
Only two facilities in the U.S. are currently equipped to operate DPR — both are in Texas. Big Spring in West Texas identified DPR as the most feasible way to address an urgent need to diversify the city’s water portfolio and increase its supply reliability for when rains failed to fill the city’s reservoirs — the project now serves around 135,000 people. Wichita Falls in northern Texas, serving 150,000 people, followed Big Spring’s example. Anticipating a water crisis with the city reservoirs at less than 20 percent capacity in 2012, and lacking a groundwater backup supply, Wichita Falls determined DPR was a viable means of urgently meeting potable water demands. The two systems can supply 2 million and 5 million gallons per day, respectively.
Both facilities have been successful and without incident, yet the catalyst for both was an emergency. Such was the water crisis both cities were facing, Texas had to use emergency water regulations in order to build the facilities without formal DPR regulations. DPR is yet to become a mainstream and a trusted water supply system, and it still remains unused outside times of crisis and for larger communities.
Only Arizona has draft regulations that allow for DPR while formal regulations are drawn, while California, Colorado and Florida are actively pursuing regulations. This is mainly due to a lack of public acceptance. The speed at which DPR recycles wastewater makes it particularly vulnerable to “toilet to tap” attacks, and this has consumers concerned, who worry over the small room for error and the “yuck factor.”
An attempt to introduce potable reuse in San Diego in the 1990s failed after fears of “drinking sewage” diminished trust in the project and fostered uncertainty about the safety of the water.
And in 2005, just 28 percent of people randomly surveyed in San Diego strongly favored or somewhat favored using advanced treated recycled water to supplement the drinking water supply.
San Diego has changed its mind and now it may one day do for DPR what OCWD has done for IPR and pave the way for DPR use on a wider scale.
With lessons learned from OCWD, outreach helped bring the community on board in San Diego. “We had to educate the community on the concept [of potable reuse],” Amy Dorman, a senior engineer on San Diego’s Pure Water program, says. “We ran focus groups with the community, made ourselves flexible moving forward and recognized the importance of listening to the community. In the ‘90s, there was not the right amount of education. Now it’s comprehensive. We do tours, presentations, websites, mailers and [identify] all stakeholders — [ensuring] diligent and constant outreach.”
Dorman explains that 18,665 San Diegans have visited the demonstration facility, while the team at Pure Water has spoken to almost 30,000 children in schools. They explain that 50,000 lab tests have been carried out on the water supply, each meeting every regulatory standard and producing exceptional water quality — typical tap water is actually less highly treated than DPR tap water.
But the key statistic is that 85 percent of San Diego’s water is already imported from the Colorado River and Northern California Bay Delta. In fact, because the city is downstream, Dorman says that the water has already been recycled 49 times by other water districts before it reaches San Diego. She says this usually quells fears that drinking recycled water is unsanitary, since, as it turns out, residents have been doing it for years.
“What we know now is that it’s possible to convince people,” adds Mosher. “We have proven that every community you go into that has concerns, you can overcome.”
San Diego hopes that by 2035, a third of the city’s supply will come from locally supplied, recycled wastewater instead of importing the majority of its water supply.
For phase one, the Pure Water San Diego program — funded by the San Diego government — will use IPR to provide the city with 30 million gallons of water per day, utilizing the nearby Miramar Reservoir as an environmental buffer in a similar way to how Orange County uses its groundwater basin.
But phases two and three target an additional 53 million gallons of water per day. In the absence of a groundwater basin and large enough reservoirs, Pure Water San Diego plans to employ DPR to realize the project’s full scale.
Mosher says that cities with plans to do DPR one day don’t want the attention, to be the ones to take the dive into doing it on a large scale. But with projects on the horizon in San Diego, as well as El Paso, Texas, Mosher expects greater faith in the process by the end of the decade, and a 2011 public opinion poll shows that citizens are 50 percent more likely to accept recycled water when they learn that other communities have done so already.
Without a leader in the field, there is hesitancy among cities interested in doing DPR, but Gerrity is positive about the impact San Diego can have countrywide.
“It’s a good platform to go forward,” he says. “We have more options for facing water scarcity, another tool in the toolbox to tap into. Conservation, potable reuse [and] innovative technologies all extend supply and give high-quality drinking water to the public.”
Mainstreaming Potable Reuse
While water reuse is breaking into the mainstream, there are still challenges going forward.
It is not simply a matter of copying Las Vegas, Orange County or San Diego. The geography and finances of a region often dictate a city’s water supply — and that has a huge impact on what kind of reuse that city can attempt. De facto reuse, as in Las Vegas, is incredibly site-specific and requires the geography of an area to substitute for advanced treatment, while the most successful IPR projects rely on large groundwater basins and nearby reservoirs.
Both types of potable reuse are also incredibly expensive, and while they may save money in the long term, they require a huge initial investment. The advanced water purification facility in Wichita Falls, for example, cost $13 million. OCWD, serving 2.5 million people, will have spent upwards of half-a-billion dollars once the final phase of their project is complete, almost doubling their initial outlay. Irrespective of the size of your service area, installing an advanced treatment facility is expensive.
There are ways to get around the financial obstacles, though. Districts not doing potable reuse may help fund water reuse projects in exchange for a greater share of the pie. Take Las Vegas, for example. It makes no sense for SNWA to build an advanced water purification facility — the city’s proximity to Lake Mead keeps pumping costs low, and the lake itself acts as a natural cleanser. However, SNWA is currently in discussions to potentially fund potable reuse projects in California in exchange for additional water from the Colorado River.
Gerrity says this could happen on a wider scale. “Anywhere with water scarcity, it’ll make sense for us to realize, by investing in water infrastructure we can alleviate problems.”
And working out what works best for one community is half the battle. Because there is no one size fits all thanks to the geographical nuances that help potable reuse or de facto reuse to work.
“You could take what Orange County does and it’s going to work, but the question is whether that is the best approach for that location. So, the challenge is, now that we feel comfortable with one approach, can we do it a different way?” says Gerrity.
Mosher is trying to compile all the information on water reuse into an easy-to-read guidance document that cities considering the process can use to inform which approach may be best for them.
“It’s about getting to a point where communities who want to try DPR don’t feel overwhelmed,” says Mosher.
What’s clear is that the Colorado River can no longer be relied upon to provide such vast numbers of people with their water needs. If we are to continue asking so much of it, then we have to start easing those pressures. Water reuse is a future imperative if the driest parts of the world are to continue growing without decimating the environment that relies as much on water as we do.
Earlier this April, researchers at San José State University’s Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center in Northern California were gathering chamise at Blackberry Hill, a site in the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains. In the past few years, it was a site that they had revisited to gather samples of the native shrub. While surveying the land at the site, the researchers made a disconcerting discovery: new, green growth was nowhere to be found.
“Wow, never seen April fuels look so… dry,” the research centertweeted.
In aseparate tweet,the researchers stated that fire season in 2021 was looking “grim.” The reason? This year’s live fuel-moisture content (FMC), a metric which measures the ratio of moisture to natural combustible material, is historically low. Average fuel-moisture content in the wild is 137 percent; low is usually considered to be 115 percent. Right now, in 2021, the Northern California region is at 97 percent. Lower fuel-moisture content means higher flammability, and therefore higher chances of wildfires.
“Fire danger is a function of not only the weather, but the condition of the fuels — and the most important thing about the fuels is their moisture content,” said Craig Clements, a professor and director of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center at San José State University. Clements said he was “shocked” that they didn’t see new growth.
Every year, for two weeks during the spring, Clements and his colleagues go to the same three sites near the Santa Cruz mountains to take samples of scrub clippings to measure the FMC. Usually, April is a good month for new growth and moisture. It’s when Clements and the other researchers expect to measure their highest FMC ratios. Hence why the low ratio and lack of new growth was so shocking.
Clements checked in with other researchers who sampled various sites around the state of California and found that an astonishing number of sites are reportedly drier than normal.
“Some sites have new growth, but it’s still not what we expect in a normal year, and this is directly related to drought,” Clements said. “No rain, or low precipitation, equals drier-than-average fuel moistures.”
Indeed, the state of California has found itself in yet anotherdroughtthis year. Meaning the likelihood of another severe wildfire season following acatastrophic 2020 wildfire season is high.
But it’s not just California. It’s the entire West Coast that is poised to have a wildfire season more catastrophic than the last. Indeed, the combination of low winter rainfall, fewer new shrubs and plant growth this spring, and a predicted dry summer are of great concern to climatologists and wildfire researchers.
The upcoming wildfire season could top even 2020, which, for the state of California, was its most severe in modern history. Over 10,000 wildfires tore through the state; nearly 4.2 million acres burned. Its northern neighbor Oregon also experienced one of its most destructive wildfire seasons in modern history, as did the state of Washington. In total, wildfires burned 10.2 million acres on the West Coast, killing at least 37 people and causing over $19.8 billion in damages.
“The long-term fire weather forecast doesn’t look good,” said Susan Prichard, a fire ecologist at the University of Washington. Prichard agreed that one of the main reasons was that “in parts of all of California and a lot of the Southwest, fuels are already dry.”
Nicholas Bond, a climatologist for the state of Washington and principal research scientist at the University of Washington, said that the state of Washington had a higher-than-normal snowpack this winter, which was quite wet. That might seem like good news. Yet historically, there is a trend over the past decade of increasingly destructive wildfires each year.
“That trend is staring us in the face,” Bond said. He noted that an anticipated hot, dry summer will cause the snowpack to melt. “Even though we have right now an abundant snowpack right now, that’s not going to last forever,” he added.
As the snow melts in the later part of the summer, the landscape dries out and becomes prime fuel for wildfires, with the exception of the highest elevations in the mountains.
“It helps to have those great snowpacks for various reasons — for forest health, it’s a good thing,” Bond said. “But even if you have a good snow year like we have right now, you can have a bad fire season.”
In spring 2020, wildfireresearchers began expressing their concernsabout a severe wildfire season. But strange weather events, like lightning storms in California, made matters worse.
Bond said weather forecasters predict a hot and dry summer across the West Coast, but it can’t be predicted now if there will be strong winds or similar storms.
“We can’t anticipate whether we’re going to have one of those [weather events] or not — chances are there won’t be anything of that severity this year, but that’s kind of a wild card,” Bond said. “Climate change is a real thing, and this is one of the manifestations that we’re having in the West.”
As Prichard explained, the fire season is not entirely in the hands of Mother Nature — there’s a human factor, too.
“The dice are loaded, but we still get to roll the dice,” she said, paraphrasing a colleague. “I thought that that was a perfect way to describe the upcoming fire season because with these dry fuels and these longer, hotter, often windier summers that we’re getting. But the variable that we don’t know about is lightning and human fire starts.” And that last possibility, of course, is preventable.
Throughout the world, scientists are speaking out like never before. They’re talking about an emergency situation of the health of the planet threatening “complex life,” including, by default, human life.
It’s scary stuff. On this subject, America’s green NGOs prefer to address the danger by sticking to a middle ground, don’t scare people, too much doom and gloom backfires, turns people off, it’s counterproductive.
However, emergencies have been happening for some time now. So, it’s kinda hard to ignore. In fact, that’s why it’s so obviously easy to declare emergencies today, yesterday, and the day before yesterday and many yesterdays before that. In other words, the house has been on fire for some time but the fire engines never show up.
A recent fundamental study discusses the all-important issue of failing support of complex life:
Humanity is causing a rapid loss of biodiversity and, with it, Earth’s ability to support complex life.
The ramifications are unnerving. Accordingly, Earth’s ability to support complex life is officially at risk. That’s what the scientists are implying within the meaning of the article’s title: “Understanding the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.”
Indeed, the article identifies a life or death chronology, or summation, of all of the emergencies already underway. That’s real! Moreover, the risk of a “ghastly future” is not taken lightly; rather, the heavily researched article includes high-powered renowned scientists authoring one of the most significant articles of the 21st century, boldly describing risks of an offbeat pathway to a ghastly future, therefore begging the question of what a ghastly future really looks like.
An armchair description of a ghastly future is a planet wheezing, coughing, and gasping for air, searching for non-toxic water, as biodiversity dwindles to nothingness alongside excessive levels of atmospheric CO2-e, bringing on too much heat for complex life to survive. Sound familiar? In part, it is.
Along the way, the irretrievable loss of vertebrates, or complex life forms like wild mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians have reduced to 5% of the planet’s total biomass. The remaining 95%: (1) livestock (59%) and (2) humans (36%). (Bradshaw, et al) How long does that cozy relationship last?
It’ll likely last for decades, maybe, but probably not for centuries. But then again, nobody really knows for sure how long it’ll last. Meanwhile, the human version of complex life resides in comfortable artificial lifestyles framed by cement, steel, glass, wood, and plastic, and surrounded by harmful fertilizers, toxic insecticides, and tons of untested chemicals. There are more than 80,000 chemicals registered for use in the U.S., most of which have not been studied for safety or toxicity to humans.
As a consequence of how artificial lifestyles influence how people view the world, it’s no surprise that Disneyland is a huge success, a big hit, with its flawless artificiality that offers a comfort zone for families within its mastery of hilarious bio-diverse imagery, all fake.
But, while Disneyland prospers, biodiversity is on a slippery slope, barely hanging on for dear life at 5% of total biomass. Once that final 5% goes down the drain, which now looks promising, human life will be all that remains along with herds of cows, pens of pigs, and coops of chickens. Phew!
Already, it is mind-blowing that two-thirds of wild vertebrate species have disappeared from the face of the planet within only 50 years, a world-class speed record for extinction events. At that rate, the infamous Anthropocene will usher in the bleakest century since commencement of the Holocene Epoch of the past 10,000-plus years, especially in consideration of the remorseful fact that, over the past 300 years, global wetlands have been reduced to 15% of their original composition.
That one fact alone, as highlighted in the Bradshaw report, describes an enormous hole in the lifeblood of the planet. Wetlands are the “kidneys for the world’s landscape” (a) cleansing water (b) mitigating floods (c) recharging underground aquifers, and (d) providing habitat for biodiversity. What else does that?
Once wetlands are gone, there’s no hope for complex life support systems. And, how will aquifers be recharged? Aquifers are the world’s most important water supply. Yet, NASA says 13 of the planet’s 37 largest aquifers are classified as overstressed because they have almost no new water flowing in to offset usage. No wetlands, no replenishment. Ipso facto, the Middle East is on special alert!
Meanwhile, dying crumbling ecosystems all across the world are dropping like flies with kelp forests down >40%, coral reefs down >50%, and 40% of all plant life endangered, as well as massive insect losses of 70% to 90% in some regions approaching wholesale annihilation. It’s entirely possible that the planet has never before experienced this rate of loss.
Alas, the loss of biodiversity brings a plethora of reductions in associated benefits of a healthy planet: (1) reduced carbon sequestration (CO2-e already at all-time highs), (2) reduced pollination (insect wipe-out), (3) degraded soil (especially Africa), (4) foul air, bad water (especially India), (5) intense flooding (especially America’s Midwest), (6) colossal wildfires (Siberia, California, Amazon, Australia), (7) compromised health (rampaging viruses and 140 million Americans with at least one chronic disease, likely caused, in part, by environmental degradation and too much toxicity).
Barring a universal all-hands-on-deck recovery effort of Earth’s support systems for complex life; e.g., revival of wetlands, it’s difficult to conceive of a future without the protection of Hazmat suits.
Integral to the continual loss of nature’s bounty, an overcrowded planet brings in its wake regenerative resource limitations. Accordingly, some estimates claim 700-800 million people already are currently starving and 1-2 billion malnourished and unable to function fully. Um, does that describe life or is it sub-life?
One of the most telling statistics within the Bradshaw report states: “Simultaneous with population growth, humanity’s consumption as a fraction of Earth’s regenerative capacity has grown from ~ 73% in 1960 to 170% in 2016.” Ipso facto, humans are consuming more than one Earth. How long does that last, especially considering the deflating fact that regeneration turned negative, circa 1970s?
Ecological overshoot is a centerpiece of the loss of biodiversity:
This massive ecological overshoot is largely enabled by the increasing use of fossil fuels. These convenient fuels have allowed us to decouple human demand from biological regeneration: 85% of commercial energy, 65% of fibers, and most plastics are now produced from fossil fuels. Also, food production depends on fossil-fuel input, with every unit of food energy produced requiring a multiple in fossil-fuel energy (e.g., 3 × for high-consuming countries like Canada, Australia, USA, and China; overshootday.org). (Bradshaw, et al).
As loss of biodiversity delves deeper into the lifeblood of the planet, it becomes a festering problem that knows no end. Still:
Stopping biodiversity loss is nowhere close to the top of any country’s priorities, trailing far behind other concerns such as employment, healthcare, economic growth, or currency stability. It is therefore no surprise that none of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets for 2020 set at the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD.int) 2010 conference was met. (Bradshaw, et al)
No surprise there.
Making matters much, much worse:
Most of the nature-related United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (e.g., SDGs 6, 13–15) are also on track for failure. (Bradshaw, et al)
No surprise there.
Even the World Economic Forum, which is captive of dangerous green-washing propaganda, now recognizes biodiversity loss as one of the top threats to the global economy. (Bradshaw, et al)
No surprise there.
So, where, when, and how are solutions to be found? As stated above, there’s no shortage of ideas, but nobody does the work because solutions are overwhelming, too expensive, too complicated. Yet, plans are underway to send people to Mars!
Meanwhile, the irrepressible global warming fiasco is subject of a spaghetti-type formula of voluntary commitments by nations of the world (Paris 2015) to contain the CO2-e villain, all of which has proven to be nightmarishly inadequate. Human-induced greenhouse gases continue hitting record levels year-over-year. That’s the antithesis of success. According to the Bradshaw report: “Without such commitments, the projected rise of Earth’s temperature will be catastrophic for biodiversity.” Hmm — maybe declare one more emergency. Yes, no?
Alas, it’s difficult to imagine loss of biodiversity beyond what’s already happened with 2/3rds of wild vertebrate life gone in only 40-50 years. Also, not to forget invertebrates. When’s the last time a bug splattered on a windshield anywhere in America?
Looking ahead, the best advice may be to make preparations for universal pandemonium, which coincidentally is the namesake of the Capitol (Pandemonium) of Hell in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, circa 17th century England.
What to do? Maybe forego any new emergency declarations (the current crop of emergencies, like impending loss of The Great Barrier Reef, are already happening and too much to absorb) and remediation plans that go nowhere, leaving behind a stream of broken promises and false hope, especially after so many years of broken promises and protocols and meetings and orgs that go nowhere, but meanwhile, they preach stewardship of the planet. What’s with that?
Postscript: The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its life forms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well informed experts. (“Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future”)
Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.
