tagged w/ erratic rainfall
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"The year 2010 was one the worst years in world history for high-impact floods. But just three weeks into the new year, 2011 has already had an entire year's worth of mega-floods. “ -- Meteorologist Jeff Masters
I spend hours a day researching what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls “global weirding”: the destabilization of our weather system fueled by the three million tonnes of fossil fuel pollution we inject into it each hour. So it is a rare day when something shocks me as much as a recent U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) report on last year’s extreme rainfall.
As most locals know from soggy personal experience, our corner of planet Earth since last spring has been a bit wetter and greyer than normal. And next door, our Washington neighbours donned their gum boots and slogged through their fourth wettest year since 1895.
Still, we got off lucky. Very lucky it turns out.
According to this jaw-dropping NASA report, worldwide rainfall and snowfall were so extreme, in so many places last year, that sea levels fell dramatically.
Sea levels have been rising steadily for over a century as the ever warmer ocean water expands and the world’s remaining glaciers and ice sheets melt. In fact sea levels are rising twice as fast now as they were a few decades ago. As the NASA chart above shows there have been some ups and downs but nothing in the modern satellite record comes close to the 6 mm drop worldwide last year.
While 6 mm might not sound like a lot, when collected from the surface of all our planet’s oceans it adds up to 26,000 gallons of water per human.
So just where did all this missing water go?
The ringleader of the great water heist was one of the strongest La Nina cycles of recent times. La Nina shifted and altered weather patterns causing extreme precipitation to funnel into places like India, Pakistan, Australia, and northern tiers of both South and North America.
In the map below, produced from NASA’s GRACE satellite data, blue indicates areas that gained water last year. The darkest blue areas gained as much as 50 mm in one year.
These dark blue spots are also the sources of the world’s epic floods of the last couple years which not only left tens of millions homeless and destroyed agriculture and infrastructure, but also left behind so much water that global oceans were depleted by 6 mm.
A YEAR OF RECORD FLOODING
Last year 182 floods affected 180 million people, almost double the annual average for the last decade. Here are a few:
snip
NOW WHAT?
Well in the short term the seas will start rising again. As the NASA report states:
“water flows downhill, and the extra rain will eventually find its way back to the sea. When it does, global sea level will rise again. ‘We're heating up the planet, and in the end that means more sea level rise’".
What happens in the medium and long term depends on us. We humans really have only one question to answer: To burn or not to burn?
OPTION A: Leave most fossil fuels in the ground -- forever.
OPTION B: Keep doing what we are doing and dig up every last crumb of carbon and burn it.
The climate science is clear that we cannot burn most of the fossil fuels we already know about and also have a stable enough weather system that we can continue to prosper.
As local Nobel laureate and world famous climate scientist, Andrew Weaver, explained in a talk at UBC the other night, just reducing the rate at which we burn fossil fuels won’t prevent dangerous levels of climate change beyond 2C warming. Instead we must totally eliminate fossil fuel emissions.
Weaver showed that even if humanity cut 90% of our fossil fuel use by 2050 but kept burning that last 10% into the future, then we would still heat the climate by more than 2C. That sends us into the realm of dangerous and dramatic climate changes that Canada, USA and every major nation has stated clearly we must avoid.
As Weaver summed it up:
"At some point we just have to say stop.”
More at the link"The year 2010 was one the worst years in world history for high-impact floods.... more
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From Maryland to New England, the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee flooded roads and highways, swelled waterways and put emergency responders still weary from dealing with last week's cleanup back on alert.
As rivers and streams rose dangerously from flash flooding, many East Coast residents Wednesday began the now familiar process of bailing water from basements or even heading to public shelters.
At least one rain-related death was reported. Police in Derry Township, Pa., said a man who was removing water from his basement was killed when the house's foundation collapsed.
"Now it's getting on my last nerves," said Carol Slater, 53, of Huntersfield, N.Y., on the northern edge of New York's Catskill Mountains and just outside of hard-hit Prattsville.
As rain washed out the tennis matches for the second straight day at the U.S. Open in New York City, the National Weather Service predicted it would continue to fall heavily across the mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states through Thursday with anywhere from 4 to 7 more inches falling and up to 10 inches in isolated pockets. Flood watches and warnings were up throughout the region.
Tom Russell, meteorologist at CBS affiliate WHP in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, reports that homeowners in Little Falls, New Jersey can't seem to catch a break. The Passaic river is expected to keep rising, and not crest until this weekend.
"My wife's going into labor tonight. She's getting induced, so we have to get out of here, and with all this that's going on, it's insane," Little Falls resident Raffaelle LaGonigro lamented. "It's supposed to be a happy time, and right now she's stressed out, she's crying."
In Pennsylvania, rain set off flash flooding across a wide swath of the state, shutting down roads, closing some schools early and forcing evacuations.
"The same areas are getting hit repeatedly," by rain, said Larry Nierenberg, a national weather service spokesman who monitors an area that includes Greater Philadelphia and most of New Jersey.
On Wednesday, near Trenton, N.J., he said a half inch of rain fell in 10 minutes. "You get something like that and it can drop 2-3 inches of rain in an hour, and then it will move on."
New York positioned rescue workers, swift-water boats and helicopters with hoists to respond quickly in the event of flash flooding. Teams stood by in Vermont, which bore the brunt of Irene's remnants last week, and hundreds of Pennsylvania residents were told to flee a rising creek.
Areas of New York's Broome County, including portions of downtown Binghamton, were being evacuated Wednesday night as heavy rains caused flood levels on the Susquehanna River and other creeks and tributaries. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation was installing flood control gates in several locations throughout the county, according to a statement from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who planned to tour the region on Thursday.
Numerous sections of the New York Thruway, including exit ramps, flooded Wednesday night and motorists were advised to take alternate roads, but many of them, too, were covered with water.
More at the linkFrom Maryland to New England, the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee flooded roads and... more
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The driest 10-month period on record for Texas has devastated the state and its crops. The National Weather Service warned Monday:
THERE IS LITTLE TO SUGGEST ANY END TO THE DROUGHT
Every state — along with much of Asia — has been hit by record temperatures this summer. And thanks in large part to extreme weather around the globe, food prices are stuck at record levels, causing hardship for tens of millions:
Dr. Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, emailed TP Green, that while Gov. Perry may deny climate science:
There are dozens of credible atmospheric scientists in Texas at institutions like Rice, UT, and Texas A&M, and I can confidently say that none agree with Gov. Perry’s views on the science of climate change. This is a particularly unfortunate situation given the hellish drought that Texas is now experiencing, and which climate change is almost certainly making worse.
Global warming is certainly making the drought hotter, which creates a vicious cycle, since the higher temps dry out the earth, but the drier it gets, the hotter its gets, as the NWS explains below.
Yet, the dots aren’t being connected for the public by and large. “In Coverage of Extreme Weather, Media Downplay Climate Change” as a Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting analysis recently concluded.
Indeed, I just saw NBC Evening News tonight, which explained that we are seeing record food prices and that extreme weather is a major contributor, but had no mention whatsoever of climate change.
The dividing line between good climate reporting and bad climate reporting is almost always whether the reporter talked to real climate scientists. Typically, the more a reporter talks to, the better the story.
That’s a key reason why ABC News has been one of the few major media outlets to explain the connection between extreme weather and global warming (see links below). And they did so last night. Indeed, they went beyond the connection between global warming and extreme weather to the key climate impact on crops and food prices:
Great quote by climatologist Heidi Cullen, “When you crank up the heat, when you globally warm the planet, you’re going to see more extreme events.”
Governor Rick Perry, who failed to stop the drought with his prayer proclamation, yesterday dismissed any worries about the impact of the drought on Texas, saying “we’ll be fine. As my dad says, it’ll rain. It always does.“ He is not only unaware of the recent climate studies warning of permanent drought in the region (see literature here), but also the stunning warning from National Weather Service that there is no end in sight to the drought:
More at the link.The driest 10-month period on record for Texas has devastated the state and its crops.... more
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Food prices are skyrocketing all across the globe, and there's no end in sight. The United Nations says food inflation is currently at 30% a year, and the fast-eroding value of the dollar is causing food prices to appear even higher (in contrast to a weakening currency). As the dollar drops in value due to runaway money printing at the Federal Reserve, the cost to import foods from other nations looks to double in just the next two years -- and possibly every two years thereafter.
That's probably why investors around the globe are flocking to farmland as the new growth industry. "Investors are pouring into farmland in the U.S. and parts of Europe, Latin America and Africa as global food prices soar," reports Bloomberg magazine (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...). "A fund controlled by George Soros, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, owns 23.4 percent of South American farmland venture Adecoagro SA."
Jim Rogers is also quoted in the same story, saying, "I have frequently told people that one of the best investments in the world will be farmland."
That's because demand for food is accelerating even as radical climate changes, a loss of fossil water supplies, and the failure of genetically engineered crops is actually reducing food yields around the globe. Ceres Partners, which invests in farmland, has produced astonishing 16 percent annual returns since its launch in 2008. And this is during a depressed economy when most other industries are showing losses.
Why growing and storing your own food can be a goldmine
All this means we can count on three things happening in the years ahead:
Prediction #1) Food supplies will become more scarce.
Prediction #2) Food prices will double over the next 2-3 years, and then probably double again in another 2-3 years.
Prediction #3) When food prices are 400% of today's levels, backyard farming or gardening pays off big in terms of real dollar savings.
In other words, as food prices skyrocket, it becomes increasingly more financially viable to grow your own food (or store it now while prices are low). I'm listing some resources below where you can learn more about growing your own food or storing high-density superfoods right now, but in the mean time, I'd like you to start considering the idea of starting your own garden in the spring.
You can't grow gold. You can't print your own currency (unless you're the Fed). But you CAN grow something more valuable than gold and money: Food!
Learn more:
http://www.naturalnews.com/033319_food_prices_farmland.html#ixzz1VJJLuwL0Food prices are skyrocketing all across the globe, and there's no end in sight.... more
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Wendy Johnston with Oakwyn Farms in Athens, West Virginia, is deeply concerned about how shifting weather patterns are impacting farmers' ability to feed the global population.
"This year we're off to a slow start," Johnston, who farms 40 hectares, told Al Jazeera. "Last year in April we were able to plant, but this year we even had rain, cold and snow a few days in April. The weather has become very unpredictable, and that's the real problem."
Climate change is making farming more difficult for her, and she wonders how much worse things will become.
On March 31, The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned of "potentially catastrophic" impacts on food production from slow-onset climate changes that are expected to increasingly hit the developing world.
The report filed with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, warned that food production systems and the ecosystems they depend on are highly sensitive to climate variability and change.
Changes in temperature, precipitation, and related outbreaks of pest and diseases could reduce production, the report said. Those particularly vulnerable are poor people in countries that rely on food imports, although climate change events are already driving up food costs around the globe, including in developed countries.
April broke many weather-related monthly records in the US, including 292 tornadoes and 5,400 extreme weather events, which combined to cause 337 deaths.
The US National Climatic Data Center announced in June that April's weather extremes were "unprecedented" and "never before" seen in a single month. The center also noted drought across the southern plains, wildfires in the southwest, and record floods along the Mississippi River.
China has been wracked by both severe drought and severe flooding this year, both resulting from climate change induced shifting weather patterns [GALLO/GETTY]
"Severe weather events around the world will increase, even parts of the globe that don't normally see extreme weather events," said Steff Gaulter, Al Jazeera's senior weather presenter. "Those parts of the world that already struggle with water shortages will find matters worsening, including Australia, Mexico, the southwest United States, and parts of Africa."
Gaulter agrees with the FAO that poorer countries are likely to be the worst affected because they have less resources to cope with disasters.
"With worsening water-shortages, there will be more crop-failures, which means an increase in malnutrition," she added. "There is also likely to be an increase in disease as people drink water that is unsuitable for consumption. All of this is an added expense that will be particularly punishing for poorer regions to endure, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa."
Approximately 300 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa currently lack access to clean drinking water.
"It is also estimated that by 2020, an additional 75 to 250 million people there will also face water shortages," said Gaulter. "That's in less than ten years."
Soil in peril
Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, believes it is time to emphasize the link between extreme weather and the global climate in which it develops.
"The environment in which all storms form has changed owing to human activities. In particular, it is warmer and more moist than it was 30 or 40 years ago," Dr Trenberth said.
"We have this extra water vapour lurking around waiting for storms to develop and then there is more moisture as well as heat that is available for these storms [to form]. The models suggest it is going to get drier in the subtropics, wetter in the monsoon trough and wetter at higher latitudes. This is the pattern we're already seeing."
Climate change has generated shifting weather patterns and extreme weather events that make it more difficult for farmers to feed us. A reliance upon non-renewable energy is also a factor in impending food crises.
Professor Michael Bomford, a research scientist at Kentucky State University and a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, is concerned about how our dependence on oil to feed ourselves is leading to soil depletion and degradation, as well as increasing prices.
"The farm is a very small proportion of the economy in the US and other developed countries, but it has a disproportionate impact on global change," Professor Bomford, who has a Master's of Pest Management and a PhD in Plant and Soil Sciences, told Al Jazeera. "Clearing land for farming releases carbon into the atmosphere and that contributes to climate change. Then by farming it, using cultivation causes soil to be lost in wind and erosion, and that topsoil took thousands of years to form. One extreme weather event can cause us to lose thousands of years of soil."
Modern farming impacts soil by the use of nitrogen fertilizers, which are energy intensive to produce and which deplete carbon in the soil.
"This erodes the soil's ability to hold nutrients, and starts a positive feedback loop," added Professor Bomford. "A lot of our soils now rely on irrigation rather than rainfall, which depletes groundwater reserves, and these have huge impacts on the soil."
William Ryerson, founder and president of the Population Media Center and president of the Population Institute, is also very concerned about fertilizers' impact on soil. He has questioned how, in the long run, this will impact agriculture.
More at the linkWendy Johnston with Oakwyn Farms in Athens, West Virginia, is deeply concerned about... more
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In eastern Orissa state’s tribal hinterlands about 200 ‘seed-mothers’ are on mission mode - identifying, collecting and conserving traditional seed varieties and motivating farming families to use them.
The seed-mothers (bihana-maa in the local dialect) from the Koya and Kondh tribal communities have reached 1,500 families in the Malkangiri and Kandhamal districts and are still counting. These women are formidable storehouses of knowledge on indigenous seeds and biodiversity conservation.
Collecting, multiplying and distributing through exchange local varieties of paddy, millet, legume, vegetables and leafy green seeds, the seed-mothers already have a solid base of 80 converted villages.
As they spread their message through the hinterland, targeting another 140 villages, the women also promote zero dependence on chemical fertilisers and pesticides.
Considering that Malkangiri is Orissa’s least developed district, with literacy at a low 50 percent and isolated by rivers, forests, undulating topography and poor connectivity, the achievement of the seed-mothers is admirable.
The struggles of Malkangiri farmers with climate change is visible in the Gudumpadar village where seed-mothers are passionately reviving agricultural heritage and convincing the community to stay with local seeds and bio-fertilisers and pesticides.
"This is the best way to cope with erratic rainfall, ensure the children are fed and avoid the clutches of moneylenders," says 65-year-old seed-mother Kanamma Madkami of Kanjeli village, who has multiplied 29 varieties of local millet and paddy seeds.
Mangu Adari, 35, who owns less than two hectares of rain-fed land, some of it on a hill slope, is one of the new converts to local seeds. Last monsoon he could cultivate paddy, millet, beans and pulses on only half his land due to late and heavy rains. This year he hopes to have a surplus to take to the market to sell for badly needed cash.
"Local plants are products of centuries of adaptation to local climate and soil characteristics, hence, indigenous paddy holds out to drought for 30 days compared to 15 days by high-yield hybrid varieties," explains Kusum Misra, coordinator in Orissa for Navdanya, a network of seed-keepers spread over 16 Indian states and supported by 54 community seed banks.
Similarly paddy grown traditionally in the lowland can survive two weeks of water logging while highland paddy varieties yield quick harvests in just 60 days, compared to the 125 days for hybrid paddy, Misra said.
Based in rice-rich Balasore district, Misra has collected and propagated more than 65- varieties of traditional paddy, including strains of aromatic rice, those with resistance to salinity (for coastal farming), floods and droughts and some with medicinal properties.
The traditional varieties respond to natural fertilisers and pesticides; and if seeds are preserved properly the farmer actually has access to no-cost farming. "When they own the seeds farmers can time the sowing or even resort to a second round of sowing if needed," says Kanamma.
snip
Seed-mothers need little more than a backyard patch to propagate seeds and supplement family nutrition. Kausalya Madakami of Malkangiri’s Manga village developed 57 varieties of food plants and exchanged them too.
Annual community seed fairs, organised right after the monsoon harvest, help promote and exchange traditional seeds and knowledge. Here the seed-mothers cook and showcase various traditional items made from indigenous paddy and millet.
Tribal women are re-learning the traditional ways of seed preservation from the seed-mothers. Vegetable seeds are smeared with wood ash, bitter begonia or neem leaf powder and stored in hollow bamboo poles while paddy and millet are safe in jute bags hung from rafters. Pre-sowing treatment may involve cow-dung and cow urine or the use of ivy gum as anti-fungal and pest repellant.
Poor seed quality marketed by the government is a real worry. The government’s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) in a status report on seed development released in March carried data showing falling rice production in six eastern states, including Orissa - the rice bowl of the country.
In Orissa, the seed germination rate for regular paddy is just 55 percent and may drop as low as 25 percent. According to the NABARD report, land under cultivation in the state is shrinking and poor quality seeds and increasing floods and droughts are making farming increasingly un-remunerative.
Well-known environmental activist and founder of Navdanya, Vandana Shiva, told IPS that "climate resilient seeds in women's hands are vital to climate security and corporations that have taken out some 1,600 patents on climate resilient seeds are biopirates".
"Allowing corporations to hijack and monopolise seed supply is a recipe for food insecurity and climate insecurity," Shiva averred.In eastern Orissa state’s tribal hinterlands about 200... more
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Last month, 350.org founder Bill McKibben published a must-read op-ed about the failure of the media and others to connect any dots between recent extreme weather events and climate change. Stephen Thomson of Plomomedia has combined McKibben’s words with striking images.
Underscoring McKibben’s point is an uber-lame New York Times story today, “As Arizona Fire Rages, Officials Seek Its Cause,” which, you guessed it, is dot free. Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters wrote Friday, “The return of critical fire conditions this weekend means that the Wallow fire will likely become Arizona’s largest wildfire in history.”
Before taking on the NYT piece, let’s look at the video:
McKibben’s piece is a nice work of rhetoric. After April saw records set for most tornadoes in a month and in 24 hours, I examined the climate-tornado link in great detail here, looking at the data, the literature, and expert analysis. That piece concluded:
1.When discussing extreme weather and climate, tornadoes should not be conflated with the other extreme weather events for which the connection is considerably more straightforward and better documented, including deluges, droughts, and heat waves.
2.Just because the tornado-warming link is more tenuous doesn’t mean that the subject of global warming should be avoided entirely when talking about tornadoes.
The NY Times has been doing some very good science reporting recently (see NY Times Bombshell: “The latest scientific research suggests” climate change is “helping to destabilize the food system”). But their overall reporting team is not connecting the dots (see, for instance, my May piece “New York Times blows the Dust Bowl story“).
The NYT had promised two years ago to do more coherent reporting, as the Columbia Journalism Review noted at the time:
Environmental S.W.A.T. Team
On Thursday, The New York Times will launch a new, crack environmental reporting unit that will pull in eight specialized reporters from the Science, National, Metro, Foreign, and Business desks in a bid for richer, more prominent coverage.
Not.
The more prominent coverage simply never happened, as I detailed in the second half of my January piece, Silence of the Lambs: Media herd’s coverage of climate change “fell off the map” in 2010, which shows that in all of 2010 none of “the largest lead headlines” in the paper dealt with climate. As professor Robert Brulle, an expert on environmental communications, wrote me at the time:
Apparently, the editorial board of the NY Times has yet to fully grasp the importance of global climate change to our collective survival. As the science becomes stronger and more dire, the editors of the NY Times bury their head deeper into the sand.
Today’s Arizona story is a case in point. Now I don’t necessarily think that every single story written on the record Arizona wildfires must focus on or even mention climate change. But the NYT story is quite specifically on the “cause” of the fires. Worse, the newspaper has no difficulty repeating dubious right-wing myths as to the cause of the fires
Many wildfires are caused by humans — and investigators say this one may have been started by two unattended campfires — distinguishing them from hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes….
Residents heaped plenty of blame on Mother Nature as harsh winds spread the flames and low humidity left the forest full of fuel. But residents and experts also pointed their fingers at a variety of policies that they said had contributed to wildfires that seem to have grown in intensity over the years.
Some complained that it was environmentalists who had caused the forests to become tinderboxes by preventing the thinning of trees as they sought to protect wildlife. Others, like William Wallace Covington, a forestry expert at Northern Arizona University, countered that the leading factor was the grazing of forest grass for generations. The government’s longstanding practice of quickly extinguishing forest fires was also seen as adding to the thick clusters of highly combustible trees.
Seriously.
You would never know from the NYT that this standard right-wing talking point has actually been examined in the scientific literature and found wanting. Back in 2006, Science magazine published a major article analyzing whether the recent soaring wildfire trend was due to a change in forest management practices or to climate change. The study, led by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, concluded:
Robust statistical associations between wildfire and hydroclimate in western forests indicate that increased wildfire activity over recent decades reflects sub-regional responses to changes in climate. Historical wildfire observations exhibit an abrupt transition in the mid-1980s from a regime of infrequent large wildfires of short (average of 1 week) duration to one with much more frequent and longer burning (5 weeks) fires. This transition was marked by a shift toward unusually warm springs, longer summer dry seasons, drier vegetation (which provoked more and longer burning large wildfires), and longer fire seasons. Reduced winter precipitation and an early spring snowmelt played a role in this shift.
That 2006 study noted global warming (from human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide) will further accelerate all of these trends during this century.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhCY-3XnqS0&feature=player_embedded
continuedLast month, 350.org founder Bill McKibben published a must-read op-ed about the... more
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Governor Daugaard Calls for Residents of Dakota Dunes to Begin Planning for Evacuation on Thursday
http://disasterrecovery.sd.gov
PIERRE, S.D. – Gov. Dennis Daugaard announced today that, based on projections by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, all residents of Dakota Dunes should immediately begin making plans to evacuate later this week, due to Missouri River flooding.
Residents should have their possessions moved, homes secured and be out of those homes by late Thursday, June 2. They should expect to be away from their homes for as much as two months because elevated releases of water from the mainstem dams will continue for several weeks.
"State and local officials are coordinating to respond to this flooding, and we are considering all possible protective measures," Gov. Daugaard said. "Every property owner in Dakota Dunes should assume the worst – that protective measures will be impossible or will fail – and should act now to remove their possessions and secure their homes."
The Corps of Engineers now projects that, once water releases reach a maximum flow of 150,000 cubic feet per second (CFS), water levels in Dakota Dunes will reach 1,098 feet above sea level. That means protective measures should be built to 1,100 feet above sea level.
When will this begin and for how long will it last?
According to Corps' plans, water releases from Gavins Point Dam Dam will increase gradually beginning today and continue through the end of this week. Beginning next week, water releases will increase more rapidly and will reach a maximum of 150,000 CFS by mid-June.
Explanation of the cause:
Over the past several days, the Corps of Engineers dramatically increased its calculation of water releases required from the mainstem dams on the Missouri River. The Corps believes that this increased water release is necessary to avoid overtopping of the spillways.
Huge rainfalls in Wyoming, Montana, and western North Dakota and South Dakota over the past month have exceeded rainfall in a normal year. This has used capacity of the reservoir system that had been reserved to accommodate the annual snowmelt. In addition, mountain snowpack is 135 percent to 140 percent of normal, and it is melting at a later time. As a result, all the moisture will require the Corps to increase water flows to unprecedented levels.Governor Daugaard Calls for Residents of Dakota Dunes to Begin Planning for Evacuation... more
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The people of Bangladesh have much to teach us about how a crowded planet can best adapt to rising sea levels. For them, that future is now.
We may be seven billion specks on the surface of Earth, but when you're in Bangladesh, it sometimes feels as if half the human race were crammed into a space the size of Louisiana. Dhaka, its capital, is so crowded that every park and footpath has been colonized by the homeless. To stroll here in the mists of early morning is to navigate an obstacle course of makeshift beds and sleeping children. Later the city's steamy roads and alleyways clog with the chaos of some 15 million people, most of them stuck in traffic. Amid this clatter and hubbub moves a small army of Bengali beggars, vegetable sellers, popcorn vendors, rickshaw drivers, and trinket salesmen, all surging through the city like particles in a flash flood. The countryside beyond is a vast watery floodplain with intermittent stretches of land that are lush, green, flat as a parking lot—and wall-to-wall with human beings. In places you might expect to find solitude, there is none. There are no lonesome highways in Bangladesh.
We should not be surprised. Bangladesh is, after all, one of the most densely populated nations on Earth. It has more people than geographically massive Russia. It is a place where one person, in a nation of 164 million, is mathematically incapable of being truly alone. That takes some getting used to.
So imagine Bangladesh in the year 2050, when its population will likely have zoomed to 220 million, and a good chunk of its current landmass could be permanently underwater. That scenario is based on two converging projections: population growth that, despite a sharp decline in fertility, will continue to produce millions more Bangladeshis in the coming decades, and a possible multifoot rise in sea level by 2100 as a result of climate change. Such a scenario could mean that 10 to 30 million people along the southern coast would be displaced, forcing Bangladeshis to crowd even closer together or else flee the country as climate refugees—a group predicted to swell to some 250 million worldwide by the middle of the century, many from poor, low-lying countries.
"Globally, we're talking about the largest mass migration in human history," says Maj. Gen. Muniruzzaman, a charismatic retired army officer who presides over the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies in Dhaka. "By 2050 millions of displaced people will overwhelm not just our limited land and resources but our government, our institutions, and our borders." Muniruzzaman cites a recent war game run by the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., which forecast the geopolitical chaos that such a mass migration of Bangladeshis might cause in South Asia. In that exercise millions of refugees fled to neighboring India, leading to disease, religious conflict, chronic shortages of food and fresh water, and heightened tensions between the nuclear-armed adversaries India and Pakistan.
Such a catastrophe, even imaginary, fits right in with Bangladesh's crisis-driven story line, which, since the country's independence in 1971, has included war, famine, disease, killer cyclones, massive floods, military coups, political assassinations, and pitiable rates of poverty and deprivation—a list of woes that inspired some to label it an international basket case. Yet if despair is in order, plenty of people in Bangladesh didn't read the script. In fact, many here are pitching another ending altogether, one in which the hardships of their past give rise to a powerful hope.
For all its troubles, Bangladesh is a place where adapting to a changing climate actually seems possible, and where every low-tech adaptation imaginable is now being tried. Supported by governments of the industrialized countries—whose greenhouse emissions are largely responsible for the climate change that is causing seas to rise—and implemented by a long list of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), these innovations are gaining credence, thanks to the one commodity that Bangladesh has in profusion: human resilience. Before this century is over, the world, rather than pitying Bangladesh, may wind up learning from her example.
cont.The people of Bangladesh have much to teach us about how a crowded planet can best... more
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Climate change is worsening, fast.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Peter Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute, an internationally recognized water expert and a MacArthur Fellow.
The National Climate Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has just announced that for the entire planet, 2010 is the hottest year on record, tied with 2005. And the period 2001 to 2010 is the hottest decade on record for the globe. The actual data are here.
This graph and this information should be on the front page of every newspaper in the world. Every Congressional representative should see it.
And the hottest 10 years on record in order?
2010
2005
1998
2003
2002
2009
2006
2007
2004
2001
How often do you have to get hit on the head before you say “ouch.” Or before you even say “stop hitting me on the head”? For climate deniers, probably forever. We can expect them to talk about how cold the winter is, here or there.But for the rest of us, enough should be enough. The planet has a fever and it’s getting worse.
Peter Gleick
___________________
But by all means, let's just keep burying our heads in the sand.Climate change is worsening, fast.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Peter Gleick is... more
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Five-year-old Fatime moves in slow motion, barely able to lift her skeletal arms and legs. Flies land on her face, and she is too weak to brush them away. She struggles to drink a cup of therapeutic milk, the only food she can swallow.
Her parents were nomads who owned dozens of camels that provided meat and milk for their family. Then the rains stopped coming. The thorn trees began dying, the vegetation withered up and the big herds of camels ceased to roam.
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Photos/Scenes from the Sahel
“I've never seen this before,” says her 29-year-old mother, Halime Djime, who has already lost two of her four children to malnutrition and disease. “Even when there were no trees, there would be vegetation. This is the first time that the land is all white.”
Fatime weighs just seven kilograms – barely half of what she should weigh at her age. Teetering between life and death, her emaciated body evokes memories of Ethiopian famines in the 1980s. Yet she is not a poster child for a celebrity benefit concert or a charity campaign. Ignored by much of the world, the starving children of the African Sahel represent a new global challenge: How to respond to the climate crisis that the world's politicians have failed to fix, and how to break the cycle of endless emergency aid in an era of donor fatigue.
Fatime's father has been on the move for years, selling his few remaining camels and seeking work in Libya and eastern Chad. His wife does not even know where he is any more. These are the days of the “climate refugees” – families splitting apart as migrants flee from increasingly harsh conditions where survival is nearly impossible.
As the desert relentlessly expands and rainfall disappears, the villages in this part of the Sahel are almost empty of men. Most have trekked to Libya or Nigeria in search of jobs. Of the people who remain, 80 per cent are women and children.
Across the Sahel, a band of semi-arid land south of the Sahara stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, an estimated 10 million people suffered food shortages this year, including 850,000 children who are acutely malnourished and could die without urgent care. In the Sahel region of Chad, more than 20 per cent of children are acutely malnourished, on top of a chronic malnutrition rate of about 50 per cent. In some regions, mothers are desperately digging into anthills in search of tiny grains and seeds for their children. And this is just one of many places around the world where the changing climate has left the people dependent on foreign aid.
When the 190-nation climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, staggered to an end last weekend, there was no binding agreement on curbing carbon emissions and no sign of a treaty to replace the soon-expiring Kyoto Protocol. The negotiators will try again next December. But regardless of those negotiations, the facts on the ground will not change: The climate is growing more precarious, and millions of people are on the move. The question now is whether to encourage them to migrate – or to salvage their ravaged land with long-term investment, instead of simply handing out emergency aid.
Unable to agree on a climate treaty, the wealthy nations at Cancun promised to help the poorer countries “adapt” to climate change. The people of the Sahel, however, have already been adapting for years – mostly by voting with their feet, abandoning their barren fields and migrating hundreds of kilometres in search of work.
“Anyone who could afford to leave has left,” says 71-year-old Adji Goukouni, deputy chief of the village of Mampel, a collection of beehive huts and stick fences in the sandy wastes of the Sahel.
“I am too old to move,” he says. “I have no strength left to work. If I have to die, I will die here.”
For more than a decade now, he has been bewildered by the changing weather patterns. Fifteen years ago, he had more than 30 cows, 10 donkeys, five camels and five horses. Then they began dying. Within the past three years, his last remaining livestock perished.
“The rainfall has been diminishing all the time,” he says. “The wind is stronger than before, and animals are fleeing. We have nothing left – we only have goats. All the animals are gone, and the wild animals too, even the geckos and hyenas and guinea fowl.”
cont.Five-year-old Fatime moves in slow motion, barely able to lift her skeletal arms and... 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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As in Arkansas, rescue efforts continue tonight in Oklahoma City after flash floods leave motorists and residents stranded. Fire crews are evacuating people as rain continues to pound the city dumping anywhere from one to three inches an hour. Weather reports state this is heading towards the East.
Global warming anyone? Let's hope people are brought to safety.As in Arkansas, rescue efforts continue tonight in Oklahoma City after flash floods... more
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Climate change has affected Kenyan coffee production through unpredictable rainfall patterns and excessive droughts, making crop management and disease control a nightmare, a researcher said on Thursday.
Intermittent rainfall in the 2007/08 crop year, for example, caused a terrible bout of the Coffee Berry Disease that cut Kenyan output 23 percent to 42,000 metric tons as farmers were caught out by rains and did not protect their crop in time.
"We have seen climate change in intermittent rainfall patterns, extended drought and very high temperatures," said Joseph Kimemia, director of research at Kenya's Coffee Research Foundation (CRF).
"Coffee operates within a very narrow temperature range of 19-25 degrees (Celsius). When you start getting temperatures above that, it affects photosynthesis and in some cases, trees wilt and dry up. We have see trees drying up in some marginal coffee areas."
For coffee to flower, for example, it needs a couple of months of dry weather followed by showers. This year, Kenya had rains in January, normally a very dry month when the bushes undergo what is known as stress before they flower.
Because of the unpredictable weather, bushes are flowering when they should not and have coffee berries at different stages of maturity. This means farmers have to hire labor through most of the year to pick very few kilos of coffee.
"You look at a coffee tree and cannot determine the season because it has beans of all ages. That is a problem when it comes to disease management, insect management and the worst problem is in harvesting," he said. "The cost is enormous."Climate change has affected Kenyan coffee production through unpredictable rainfall... more
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