tagged w/ water evaporation
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Wintertime droughts are increasingly common in the Mediterranean region, and human-caused climate change is partly responsible, according to a new analysis by NOAA scientists and colleagues at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). In the last 20 years, 10 of the driest 12 winters have taken place in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.
“The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,” said Martin Hoerling, Ph.D. of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., lead author of a paper published online in the Journal of Climate this month. “This is not encouraging news for a region that already experiences water stress, because it implies natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region’s climate to normal.”
The above is from a news release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “NOAA study: Human-caused climate change a major factor in more frequent Mediterranean droughts.”
It’s a bombshell for three reasons. First, this NOAA team has not always found a human cause for extreme weather events, as Climate Progress discussed here. Second, the study found that global warming is already driving drought in a key region of the world: Climate change is harming a great many people now. Third, the analysis provides important confirmation of climate predictions that human-caused emissions would lead to drying: “The team also found agreement between the observed increase in winter droughts and in the projections of climate models that include known increases in greenhouse gases.”
This comes on the heel of the USGS study, that, despite its flaws still found, “The decrease of floods in the southwestern region is consistent with other research findings that this region has been getting drier and experienced less precipitation as a likely result of climate change.”
And these studies amplify the piece I had in the journal Nature this week that argued drying and Dust-Bowlification driven by climate change — and the impact on food insecurity — are probably the gravest threats the human race faces in the coming decades.
The fact that the NOAA analysis confirmed the climate models predictions of drying is especially worrisome because the climate models project a very dry future for large parts of the planet’s currently habited and arable land in the coming decades:
More at the linkWintertime droughts are increasingly common in the Mediterranean region, and... more
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Massive floods have left 500 people dead across Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, officials said Monday, as authorities stepped up efforts to reach victims of the unusually heavy monsoon rains.
In Thailand, where the death toll from the country's worst floods in decades rose to 269, thousands of soldiers fanned out across affected areas as part of a huge aid operation.
Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who has described the situation as a "serious crisis," said the kingdom had two days before the arrival of the next tropical depression, but insisted the situation was under control.
"It is not necessary to announce disaster zones because we still can handle it," she told reporters, a day after postponing official visits to Singapore and Malaysia to stay and monitor the authorities' response.
She said new flood defences would be built in several locations in the north and east of the capital.
In neighbouring Cambodia, the toll from the country's worst floods in over a decade reached 207, including 83 children, a disaster official there said. Vietnam has reported 24 deaths from flooding in the Mekong Delta.
Vast swathes of rice paddy have been damaged or destroyed in Southeast Asia as a result of the floods.
In Thailand the floods have damaged the homes or livelihoods of millions of people, particularly farmers, across about three quarters of the country's provinces.
Huge efforts are now under way to stop the waters from reaching low-lying Bangkok, home to 12 million people, with prevention measures including sandbags along the Chao Phraya river.
More at the linkMassive floods have left 500 people dead across Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam,... more
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Time to get louder at government about this. Time to win this conversation with truth. CO2 traps heat. One of the main points of this, plus some others I divulge. ;l). Thanks Current for this venue for us to tell it like it is.
This video is dedicated to the indigenous peoples of our world and those experiencing the brunt of the effects of climate change/biodistress. May we find it within us to do what is right for all.Time to get louder at government about this. Time to win this conversation with truth.... more
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Randy McGee spent $28,000 in one month pumping water onto about 500 acres in West Texas before he decided to give up irrigating 75 acres of corn and focus on other crops that stood a better chance in the drought.
He thought rain might come and save those 75 acres, but it didn't and days of triple-digit heat sucked the remaining moisture from the soil. McGee walked recently through rows of sunbaked and stunted stalks, one of thousands of farmers counting his losses amid record heat and drought this year.
The drought has spread over much of the southern U.S., leaving Oklahoma the driest it has been since the 1930s and setting records from Louisiana to New Mexico. But the situation is especially severe in Texas, which trails only California in agricultural productivity.
McGee is still watering another variety of corn, cotton and sorghum but the loss of nearly one-sixth of his acres after spending so much on irrigation weighs on him.
"Kind of depressing," the 34-year-old farmer said. "You use that much of a resource and nothing to show for it. This year, no matter what you do, it's not quite enough."
About 70 percent of Texas rangeland and pastures are classified as in very poor condition, which means there has been complete or near complete crop failure or there's no food for grazing livestock. The crop and livestock losses could be the worst the state has seen — perhaps twice the previous single-year record of $4.1 billion set in 2006, said David Anderson, an economist with Texas AgriLife Extension Service.
Part of the reason for the high dollar figure is that while farmers have lost a lot, the corn and other products they are losing are worth more this year. Strong global demand and tight supplies have helped push up prices for commodities like corn, cotton, wheat and beef.
Cotton supplies are low worldwide, and U.S. cattle numbers are the lowest since the 1950s. Livestock farmers and ethanol producers are competing for corn, driving up those prices, and wheat is costing more in part because Russia banned exports after a drought there last summer.
Cotton and corn are selling for more than two-and-a-half times what they did five years ago, and the price of wheat is more than one-and-a-half times what it was in 2006.
"This was a year farmers might have done well," Anderson said.
Consumers will eventually see the cost of the drought passed on to them, although it's hard to say by how much since processing, marketing, transportation and other costs also play a big role in retail prices, he said.
Texas' economy will take a more direct hit. Agriculture accounted for $99.1 billion of Texas' $1.1 trillion economy, or 8.6 percent, in 2007, the most recent year data on food and fiber was available from the extension service. Losses in that sector have a ripple effect that's about twice the amount of the actual agricultural loss.
"That's a fairly substantial portion of the Texas economy that's going through this hardship," Anderson said.
More at the link.Randy McGee spent $28,000 in one month pumping water onto about 500 acres in West... more
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The devastating string of tornadoes, droughts, wildfires and floods that hit the United States this spring marks 2011 as one of the most extreme years on record, according to a new federal analysis.
Just shy of the halfway mark, 2011 has seen eight $1-billion-plus disasters, with total damages from wild weather at more than $32 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Agency officials said that total could grow significantly, since they expect this year's North Atlantic hurricane season, which began June 1, will be an active one.
Overall, NOAA experts said extreme weather events have grown more frequent in the United States since 1980. Part of that shift is due to climate change, said Tom Karl, director of the agency's National Climatic Data Center.
"Extremes of precipitation are generally increasing because the planet is actually warming and more water is evaporating from the oceans," he said. "This extra water vapor in the atmosphere then enables rain and snow events to become more extensive and intense than they might otherwise be."
But for some kinds of extreme weather, teasing out a contribution from climate change is more difficult.
The second half of April brought a swarm of tornadoes that leveled parts of the Midwest, including the twister that killed 151 people in Joplin, Mo. So far, 2011 has seen the sixth-highest number of tornado deaths on record, prompting many people to wonder whether climate change has played a role. So far, scientists say there's no good evidence for or against a climate change influence on tornado behavior.
Meanwhile, computer models predict that droughts -- like those that have scorched large swaths of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona this year -- will become stronger and more frequent as climate change continues. But because patterns of drought vary widely from decade to decade, that makes it "very difficult and unlikely that we're going to be able to discern a human fingerprint, if there is one, on the drought record in the foreseeable future," Karl said.
cont.The devastating string of tornadoes, droughts, wildfires and floods that hit the... more
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Longer periods of drought, decreased river flow, higher rainfall variability and lower soil moisture content: water is at the heart of the impacts of climate change. Yet the precious commodity scarcely features in climate negotiations.
Three hundred million Africans lack access to clean water; 500 million lack access to proper sanitation, according to Bai-Mass Taal, Executive Secretary from the African Ministers’ Council on Water.
"Lack of water security will be exacerbated by climate change, which directly threatens food security," says Dr Ania Grobicki, head of the Global Water Partnership (GWP).
Yet there is no focus on water in climate change negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
"There is no United Nations agency for water, and there's no international convention regulating water resource management and there is no water focus under the UNFCCC," says Grobicki. "Water also evaporated from the text of the Copenhagen Accord."
Grobicki and her colleagues argue for a focus on adaptation measures on the ground. Rehabilitation and maintenance of existing infrastructure is one place to start.
"With our local partners, we cleaned up a water course that was polluted by waste water from a sugar cane plantation in Swaziland," says Alex Simalabwi from GWP's Partnership for Africa's Water Development project. "As a result 10,000 smallholder farmers have access to clean water."
Burkina Faso, where 80 percent of the population depends on agriculture for a living, has invested in the construction of more than 1,500 small dams since 1998. These reservoirs - built at relatively low-cost, often with local communities contributing labour to their construction - are a vital protection against drought.
Most African agriculture is rain-fed, says Grobicki. "As climate variability increases and temperatures rise, water security drops radically. Dams ensure water is available throughout the year."
The scale and operation of water infrastructure needs to be carefully planned. "Using water from the river for irrigation might benefit a farming community, but it could have damaging effects downstream. That’s why it is important to have shared decision-making. In this process there will be trade-offs, but also shared benefits," she says.
Other adaptation measures include shifting to more drought-resistant crops and the use of satellite imaging to reveal moisture content of soil and guide farmers' irrigation efforts: pilot projects in several countries already send out such information via text messages to farmers' phones.
Water-saving technologies can further maximise the benefits of these strategies. "Drip irrigation offers huge potential for saving water in rural areas, while remote sensing can be used to inform farmers about the moisture content of the soil so they know how much water they need to use to grow their crops," says Grobicki.
Drip irrigation is a highly efficient means of watering crops and applying fertiliser via tubing spread throughout the field.
In Zimbabwe and Malawi, smallholder farmers are coping with drought with simple drip systems consisting of a couple of large plastic containers on a raised platform, and 100-odd metres of plastic tubes delivering the water to vegetable gardens.
snip
The call is for water to be recognised in climate change negotiations as both the transmitter of climate change impacts and an important vehicle for strengthening social, environmental and economic resilience to them.
continuedLonger periods of drought, decreased river flow, higher rainfall variability and lower... more
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nations-top-latest-water-security-risk-index/
A new report furthers the hypothesis that water stress serves as a catalyst for conflict.
Somalia has the least secure water supply while Iceland has the most stable in the world, according to a survey of 165 nations released last week by Maplecroft, a Britain-based consultancy company. The study, the Water Security Risk Index, featured three other African nations, including Mauritania, Sudan and Niger, as well as Iraq, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkmenistan and Syria.
Population growth and climate change will further exacerbate water supplies and negatively impact industrial and agricultural sectors, according to the report.
The index measured four inputs: access to improved drinking water and sanitation, availability of supplies and dependence on external sources, balance between supply and demand, and the dependence of each nation’s economy of water availability.
Many of the nations that face extreme risk, such as Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, and Uzbekistan, are experiencing tension over shared and limited water resources. These findings echo previous reports that areas with transboundary water sources have an elevated risk of conflict.
“When water becomes scare it turns into a commodity that people fight for. It also generates corruption due to its dwindling supply that is often controlled by businesses, governments, or criminals and insurgents,” Thomas Sanderson, deputy director and senior fellow of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Circle of Blue.
Pakistan and India have long disputed the water that flows from Kashmir, while Egypt and Sudan are currently embroiled in conflict over a new Nile River treaty, and Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan continue to argue over hydropower and the Amu Dari and Syr Daria rivers.
“In places like Somalia and Sudan, water is used as a weapon, depriving enemies or adversaries of access to it, with the greatest impact on non-combatants, often turning them into combatants out of desperation for water,” Sanderson said.
The report also emphasizes that insecurity stems largely from uncertain and inconsistent supplies. Only 30 percent of Somalis has a reliable source of water, while both Mauritania and Niger are more than 90 percent dependent on external water supplies.
And as resources disappear, people have a tendency to migrate.
“Water scarcity forces people to move their families and livestock to other land often bringing them into conflict with other populations, and frequently resulting in ethnic violence,” said Sanderson.nations-top-latest-water-security-risk-index/
A new report furthers the hypothesis... more
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Drier summers, more frequent droughts force some farmers off their land and threaten the nation’s harvests.
Farmers on the edge of poverty in China’s rural provinces face a bleak future in the wake of warmer temperatures, more frequent droughts and infrequent rainfall. The changing climate is forcing many harvesters into poverty or keeping them from climbing out, while convincing others to leave their farms for the cities.
The fallout from global warming is hitting China’s farming population of 750 million particularly hard, Reuters reported Monday. Using farming techniques that date back generations, including wooden plows and donkeys, rural farmers are ill equipped to cope with changing weather patterns and growing seasons.
Declan Conway, a University of East Anglia researcher who has studied climate change’s affect on China’s farmers, told Reuters that people in remote communities in China’s poorer regions are particularly exposed to climate hazards.
“Those people are already quite vulnerable, and it’s quite likely that with an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events, they’re going to feel it more in the future,” Conway said.
A recent study of vulnerable regions of China sponsored by Oxfam Hong Kong and Greenpeace found that the changing climate is making it harder for people to climb out of poverty, despite government programs that raise people’s incomes and make water more available.
The report notes that climate change has already become one of the main causes for poverty as well as a return to poverty for people in China — 95 percent of those who live in absolute poverty in China live in ecologically fragile zones, which endure climate change’s worst effects. The report warned that climate change will cripple the country’s efforts to reduce poverty without immediate action.
“There’s an association between these changes and reversion to poverty,” Lin Erda, one of China’s top experts on climate change and agriculture who co-authored the report, told Reuters. “There are uncertainties about how global warming will affect agriculture, but the risks are big, and they will first hurt the farmers in arid and semi-arid vulnerable regions.”
Unless the country encourages adaptation through improved irrigation and hardier crops, average productivity of major grains per acre could fall between 13 and 24 percent in coming decades, Lin warned.Drier summers, more frequent droughts force some farmers off their land and threaten... more
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Rivers like the Thames and the Severn are predicted to drop between 50-80% in summer months by mid century as climate change takes hold. Conservation now is key to preserving water for the future. According to the Environment Agency's plans however, desalination would have to be implemented down the road along with mandatory water restrictions to meet demand.
Amazingly, this article did not mention that if people didn't demand so much the supply would increase. So again, this goes back to the GHG emissions spewed that contribute to the greenhouse effect that contributes to climate change that contributes to water evaporation in concert with water waste by humans that starts from home consumption and mainly agriculture.
It seems unfortunate to me that people would not be willing to cut their usage voluntarily in order to not see their landscapes dotted with more desalination monstrosities that will only contribute to the very CO2 emissions causing the problem in the first place while bringing the cost of their water above what many could afford and not guaranteeing quality. As with the climate crisis, there is still a bit of time for people to understand that it is their actions or lack thereof that determine the ending to this story for us and those species affected by our actions.Rivers like the Thames and the Severn are predicted to drop between 50-80% in summer... more
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Winter ice has declined on the Great Lakes 30% since the 70s leading to lower water tables and evaporation. Considering the size of the Great Lakes and its importance to both the US and Canada, this is not a trend we can ignore.Winter ice has declined on the Great Lakes 30% since the 70s leading to lower water... more
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What will it be like when rivers run dry, land becomes dust, and our very way of life is changed forever? All you need do is look at Australia now for those answers. Anyone who doubts the presence of climate change and its effects should most definitely read this article.What will it be like when rivers run dry, land becomes dust, and our very way of life... more
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