The Drought Thread Pt. 2 (merged)

[Lore]

One of the perpetual myths circulating around the Internet about climate change is that life can somehow adapt to climatic shifts in temperature as rapidly as it's occurring. That we will be basking in the shade of palm trees in Montreal Canada eating bananas and pomegranates someday soon. The cynical truth is most life will not adapt so quickly. It takes many generations of natural selection for natural adaption to take place which for some species would amount to a multi-melenial time scale. You can't air drop in the vast majority of plants and animals into an environment not fundamentally suited for them and expect them to thrive. Therefore humans, even as adaptable as we are, will find it very difficult to obtain the basic resources themselves in which to survive.

[dohboi]

Good point. One current example of animals unable to migrate is lake fish. Many cannot tolerate heat above a certain level, but this summers heatwaves have exceeded that level for many, so they just die in droves in place--it's a bit hard for them to just swim to a lake further north, since most of these are isolated or connect to streams that flow south.

Last I heard, all species have to now migrate the equivalent of a number of feet a day just to stay in the zone they have evolved to live in. Besides lake fish, all plants obviously have some...trouble migrating at that rate.

[ritter]

Good point. One current example of animals unable to migrate is lake fish. Many cannot tolerate heat above a certain level, but this summers heatwaves have exceeded that level for many, so they just die in droves in place--it's a bit hard for them to just swim to a lake further north, since most of these are isolated or connect to streams that flow south.

Last I heard, all species have to now migrate the equivalent of a number of feet a day just to stay in the zone they have evolved to live in. Besides lake fish, all plants obviously have some...trouble migrating at that rate.

I'll add another example. Climate change is killing birds--a species you'd think would be mobile enough to cope. But, it is altering their migration patterns, food sources and habitats.
http://www.climate.org/topics/climate-change/migratory-birds-climate-change.html

There is an old rhetorical question among ecologists/biologists/conservationists. If you save a species in a zoo but not its habitat, have you actually saved the species? Sure, the DNA is there in the animal, but the animal won't survive without our life support since we destroyed its habitat. Climate is crucial to habitat.

[dohboi]

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/08/17/706311/the-shape-of-droughts-to-come-2012-versus-the-1930s-dust-bowl/

The Shape Of Droughts To Come: 2012 Versus The 1930s Dust Bowl

The fact that we are experiencing a drought in 2012 comparable to the great Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s–without poor farming practices being partially to blame–bodes ill for the future of drought in the U.S. With human-caused global warming expected to greatly increase the intensity and frequency of great droughts like the 2012 drought in coming decades, we can expect drought to cause an increasing amount of damage and economic hardship for the U.S. Since the U.S. is the world’s largest food exporter, this will also create an increasing amount of hardship and unrest in developing countries that rely on food imports.

[dissident]

One of the perpetual myths circulating around the Internet about climate change is that life can somehow adapt to climatic shifts in temperature as rapidly as it's occurring. That we will be basking in the shade of palm trees in Montreal Canada eating bananas and pomegranates someday soon. The cynical truth is most life will not adapt so quickly. It takes many generations of natural selection for natural adaption to take place which for some species would amount to a multi-melenial time scale. You can't air drop in the vast majority of plants and animals into an environment not fundamentally suited for them and expect them to thrive. Therefore humans, even as adaptable as we are, will find it very difficult to obtain the basic resources themselves in which to survive.

The main problem is that biomes don't migrate like weather patterns. You can't have fertile soil in the Arctic tundra and most of the boreal forest regions of Canada, Europe and Asia. So there will not be any farm belt shifting to the pole. You will simply have massive loss of good farmland. All the denier jokers think that food must grow in supermarkets and is somehow not dependent on long term weather changes.

I guess some of that must originate from the idea that we will just irrigate our way to happiness. That ain't happening without massive water diversion projects (of the Stalin type) to send Canadian rivers to the USA and pump the Mississippi dry, since the aquifers are not able to sustain indefinite output and will be depleted before 2050. So we had George W. Bush whinging about CO2 reduction measures costing hundreds of billions of dollars but in the long run we are looking at trillions of dollars of expenses to deal with climate change. Of course, if W. knew something about economics he would realize that spending money is good for the economy. He wouldn't need to print it either at the levels he was complaining about.

[Graeme]

Potentially tens of trillions:
http://www.treehugger.com/climate-chang ... money.html

[Lore]

The main problem is that biomes don't migrate like weather patterns. You can't have fertile soil in the Arctic tundra and most of the boreal forest regions of Canada, Europe and Asia. So there will not be any farm belt shifting to the pole. You will simply have massive loss of good farmland. All the denier jokers think that food must grow in supermarkets and is somehow not dependent on long term weather changes.

The increasing chaotic whipsaw of droughts, floods and violent weather in general will make it nearly impossible to count on a productive farm anywhere on the planet. How will humans plant and raise anything near to the quantities needed in the future?

[dissident]

Potentially tens of trillions:
http://www.treehugger.com/climate-chang ... money.html

Thanks for the great link. Deniers are indeed morons.

[dohboi]

Yes, good link. But ultimately, quantifying these losses in terms of dollars misses the point.

No amount of money will bring back a species that has gone extinct, much less an ecosystem or a polar cap, once they are gone.

How much money will it take to replace the oxygen that 40%+ of plankton that have been wiped out used to produce?

How much money will it take to replace dead oceans with the life-rich oceans they once were?

How much money will it take to recreate the Greenland Ice Sheet once it's gone?

And ultimately, how much money will it take to find a new viable planet as full of life as this one was before homo bolidus hit it?

But money is the only thing we understand anymore, particularly policy makers and the economists that advise them, understand.

As the first commenter put it:

Ridiculous, as if we had another planet to move to...the fact is the cost is immeasurable... our lives...this not a capitalistic enterprise, worse system in the world...it is extinction of the human species.

[dissident]

But these clowns don't put any value on life forms and the biosphere. So if they can be slapped down with language they understand then it has some merit. Deniers don't have any economics arguments in their favour. Yet if you swallow the MSM koolaid then they actually do have economics arguments on their side. Much like the idiotic myth that Republicans are fiscal conservatives, which is another false image projected by the allegedly liberal MSM.

[dohboi]

Good points. They don't make any distinction between "invaluable" and "valueless." If it can't be measured in dollar terms, it is worse than useless to them.

Countering this mentality must walk the line between speaking in language they can understand and not buying in to or validating their world view, which is the ideology of total annihilation (at least that is the logical consequence of their ideology, though not one they generally acknowledge.)

[Snowstorm]

Most people don't consider me an optimist, I think we're headed for some pretty rough times, that industrial civilization is in the early stages of a catabolic collapse, and the population in a century will be much lower than now. I just don't equate rough times with hopelessness and believe there's still much good that can be done right now.

In terms of climate change specifically, as that's what this thread is about, I didn't mean to say that I think it will be idyllic, in fact I think it will be rather messy. I just used the Eocene as one example of a time when Earth was much warmer than today. From what I've read, warmer periods tend to be wetter overall, although with the shifting of climate zones some places get drier too. If you know of any research pointing to any of the warmer periods in Earth's past being the type of near-global desert that some are predicting, I would like to know.

My person focus is on adaptation because I just don't see emissions likely to be brought under control by anything other than the fuels running short. I have a pretty low carbon footprint for an American, but I see those willing to change their lifestyles in a major way to be a small minority. So, I'm more focused on adaptation.

As far as rate of change goes, I completely agree that a faster rate of change equals more problems. However, there were rapid climate shifts during and at the end of the last ice age, so I'd say that rapid shifts aren't unprecedented. Human civilization has developed in a period of unusual climate stability, at least relative to the Pleistocene with its abrupt changes. Some of the ice core in greenland have shown warming on the order of 10 degrees C in just a few years. Missouri was dominated by spruce forests at the height of the last ice age. Currently, spruce are not native to the state at all. I've read that pollen records have found that the spruce forest disappeared rapidly in many areas at the end of the ice age. Probably there was a spell of heat/drought that ended up being just too much for the spruce to handle and the trees died off en masse. I'm sure it was a rough time for the people living here during that era, as it will be during the coming climate shift, but the world didn't end. Adaptation was a much better response than hopelessness. The human species is very adaptable, even if plenty of individuals are not. It's possible that many lowland tropical areas will end up simply too hot for people to live, and refugees will stream into the colder areas. Not pretty, but once the dust has settled having some areas of the planet unlivable isn't a new situation, after all we have a whole continent that has a climate unsuited to people right now, Antarctica.

As far as the permian goes, it seems to me the cause of that extinction is far from settled, and it being due solely to warming seems unlikely to me, as plenty of other warming events didn't cause anything so dramatic. One theory is that massive volcanoes not only changes the climate but also poisoned the air and the sea and let out enough particulates to block out much of the sunlight and impair photosynthesis. The PETM warming caused some extinctions of deep sea creatures, but no increase in extinctions on land. We won't get off that well this time, human impacts having already increased the extinction rate by so much. Sometimes everything that's going on gets pretty depressing to me too, but I also find many things to see hope in as well.

[dissident]

http://earlywarn.blogspot.ca/2012/01/hi ... imate.html

We are not going to see the sort of wetness you are talking about in the near/midway future. All it takes to wipe most of us out is a few years of serious drought. There is not enough food storage to prevent famine. In a few thousand years there may be a wetter climate and more lush forests, if there are few humans to keep on destroying the biosphere. The role of forest land cover in helping to counteract the severe drying effect of exposed land (i.e. farms) should not be underestimated.

[dissident]

http://earlywarn.blogspot.ca/2012/08/la ... or-us.html

However, whereas over the twentieth century, the model runs show a first MCA mode that varies quite a bit from model to model and only explains a small amount of the total covariance, once the 21st century is included, the picture changes greatly. Now the effect of global warming is so great that all the models have similar MCA first modes, and that mode explains far more of the total covariance. So Dai's argument is that the same thing will happen with the observations - as global warming proceeds, it will increasingly overwhelm natural sea surface temperature fluctuations, and the overall drying trend that the models show will assert itself in the US also. Indeed, arguably, this has already begun in the 1990-2010 period in which the US has been drying (culminating in the serious drought this summer).

We ain't seen nothing yet.

[dohboi]

Meanwhile, the drought goes on:

http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/

Note that the area of long-term drought exploded from a bit of west Texas to essentially all of the South West, extending well into CO and OK. The darkest level of red--"exceptional drought"--spread a bit in east OK. Otherwise, not much change. I hear that they are getting seasonal rains--"monsoon"--in the SW, so perhaps the "long-term" designation will be short-lived.

[dohboi]

http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2012/08/western-north-america-drought-is-worst.html

Western North America drought is worst in 800 years, study says

A new scientific study indicates the turn-of-the-century drought in the North American West was the worst of the last millennium—with major impacts to the carbon cycle and hints of even drier times ahead.

The study, titled “Reduction in carbon uptake during turn of the century drought in western North America,” indicates that the major drought that struck western North America from 2000 to 2004 severely reduced carbon uptake and stressed the region's water resources, with significant declines in river flows and crop yields. It was published on July 29 in Nature-Geoscience.

[M_B_S]

Hungary declares drought state of emergency



http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/a ... wctan1.gif

http://www.pesterlloyd.net/html/1235not ... dwirt.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-0 ... ports.html

Hungary’s maize crop has been damaged by extreme drought and hot weather, with an estimated 40 percent of the total harvest destroyed, state news service MTI said, citing the farm association Magosz.
*****************

Climate change ?

Here is the problem for YOU!

M_B_S

More:

http://www.chron.com/news/article/Balka ... 809424.php

The record-setting average temperatures — which have been steadily rising for years because of global warming, according to scientists — have ravaged crops, vegetables, fruit, and power production in a region that already is badly hit by the global economic crisis.

This year, farmers all over the Balkans are turning to the heavens for help.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-2 ... close.html

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich will lead a meeting on Aug. 31 with government and agriculture industry experts to discuss crop data and exports, according to his press service. The country, the world’s third-biggest exporter last year, may harvest 20 percent less grain in 2013. Russia imposed an export ban in 2010, following a drought.

On the Chicago Board of Trade, wheat futures for December delivery rose 3.5 percent to $9.0575 a bushel, the biggest gain since July 19. The most-active contract dropped in the previous five sessions, the longest slide since September.

[careinke]

Seattle set a rainfall record for August this year. No rain for the entire month, first time since records have been kept.

[dohboi]

That is weird.

I see that there is now officially long-term abnormally dry conditions in central WA state, and also in GA, VA, and NY. I hadn't noticed those isolated "L"s before, and it's hard to get old info on it since the archived maps don't seem to show the "L"s and "SL"s.

Not too much change for better or worse this week, except for here in the north country (northern MN and North Dakota), where many areas took one step further along the drought continuum:

http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/

http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/archive.html

How are things looking out there, people?

[kiwichick]

hi doh

getting dry down here in australia

grain crops are in trouble and yield estimates are starting to be downgraded

after extreme flooding in March( some areas had their entire yearly average
rainfall in a week) we had a dry winter and that has continued into spring ....
so far

western australia is looking quite stressed

BTW on a completly different tack, a recent poll asking who australians would vote for between romney and obama i think the result was 90 or 95% for obama

funny considering the conservatives here would win an election easily if one was held today