The extreme drought gripping Texas and the rest of the Southwest is likely to intensify, according to a panel of climate experts from Columbia University.
Richard Seager, an expert on droughts in North America, told a Washington audience that the Texas drought of the past decade has been the continent’s most serious.
The luckiest three percent of the state’s land is rated as having a “severe drought,” said Lisa Goddard, an expert on climate prediction. Another 88% of the state is considered “exceptional.”
The drought can be attributed to the La Nina phenomenon, a cooling pattern in the Pacific Ocean, in combination with a warming pattern in the Atlantic Ocean, panelists marking the second annual Climate Science Day explained.
However, the drought is also part of a “host of problems out there that we’re creating for ourselves,” Seager said, referring to global warming. He added that we can expect weather extremes, especially the drought, to intensify, and for the Southwestern states to become more arid with time.
The drought has forced third-world like conditions on some small Texas communities.
This drought-stricken place in the scenic hills outside Austin has been forced to bring in water by truck from more than 10 miles away because its sole well came close to running out of water. Spicewood Beach is one of four subdivisions in Burnet County that became the first communities in Texas to run so low on water that it had to be hauled in by truck. The four subdivisions, made up of about 1,100 people in a part of Texas known as the Hill Country, all relied on the Spicewood Beach well.
Several times a day, a truck carrying 4,000 gallons of treated water from another subdivision has pulled up to a beige storage tank in Spicewood Beach. Workers pump the water from the truck to the tank through a long green hose. A crowd of reporters and residents watched the first delivery on Monday. But by Wednesday morning, the deliveries had become a part of life here, and no one watched as the water that residents use to wash dishes and take their showers flowed out of a truck from an aptly named company, H2O2U.
It’s probably useless to point out once again the magnified impacts of climate change on the developing countries, since the climate denial narrative is that all the third world needs is more oil and coal development.
Nevertheless, across the border, where life is lived closer to the edge, conditions are even more dire:
FRAILE, Mexico—The worst drought on record in various parts of Mexico has destroyed millions of acres of cropland and left millions of livestock without food, leading to fears about potential food shortages at a time when U.S. states like Texas are also suffering unusually dry weather.
More than half of the national territory has fallen prey to the drought, with dried-up streams in northern states like Coahuila turning into cattle graves and some towns lying abandoned as people flee the drought. More than 3.7 million acres of agriculture have been lost, an area larger than Connecticut.
“I’ve never seen a drought so intense,” said Sergio Ruiz, a livestock producer in Coahuila who has spent most of the year dragging his cattle’s carcasses into graves. He has lost 70 head of cattle and is considering moving to nearby Saltillo.
The dry weather is expected to intensify in coming months. A majority of Mexican states are expected to get between half of the usual rainfall and none at all in February and March, according to Mexico’s Agriculture Ministry.
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“The intensity of this drought surpasses the ability of government resources to address it,” said Coahuila’s deputy minister of rural development, Reginaldo de Luna Villarreal.
Very nice video, Peter! I somehow missed it in November.
there’s always somebody who missed one. Amazingly, people don’t drop everything to watch each vid as it comes out.
If accurate, this is bad news, not just for Texas, but the country as a whole.
A drought of that magnitude will affect neighboring states as well.
And any significant drop in Texas’ agricultural output will be felt nationwide.
Concern over anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) is not based on computer modelling; it is based on the study of palaeoclimatology. Computer modelling is based on physics we have understood for over 100 years and is used to predict what will happen to the atmosphere for a range of projections for CO2 reductions. As such, the range of predictions is due to uncertainty in those projections; and not uncertainties in climate science. Furthermore, when one goes back 20 years and chooses to look at the projection scenario that most-closely reflects what has since happened to emissions, one finds that the modelled prediction matches reality very closely indeed.
Why is it that ACD is still languishing in the “hypothesis” compartment of the minds of so many people (present company excepted)? Surely, it has now attained a status equivalent to The Second Law of Thermodynamics? Peter can you please table a motion to the AGU, or to whoever it is one must apply, to get decision like this made? 🙂
“Why is it that ACD is still languishing in the “hypothesis” compartment of the minds of so many people (present company excepted)?”
It’s been mentioned on this blog a number of times, but I’ll give you a quick-and-dirty rundown. All major institutions worth their salt have moved FAR beyond the “hypothesis stage”, as have most governments and international groups.
The delay lies with a deliberate, and successful, effort to cast doubt on climate science, and science in general.
http://climatecrocks.com/2011/09/16/the-weekend-wonk-naomi-oreskes-and-the-merchants-of-doubt/ is a good place to start.
The issue isn’t about what scientists say, it’s that the American public has been trained by untrustworthy people not to trust scientists about anything. On top of that, many are fed a constant stream of “your opinions are just as valid as anybody else’s facts”, which results in people clinging to ideas long after rational thought has left the building. People also care a lot about identity – what sort of person they are, and anything that would call their worldview into question is seen as an attack on their identity.
For a large portion of the Right Wing of the American public, those who disagree are evil, and so ANYTHING they say or do that is counter to what the Right believes MUST be a lie, or a conspiracy, or some other plot, regardless of whether there is evidence.
It’s rather like how the Religious Right treats things like evolution – It’s wrong because it’s not in the bible, and the bible’s right because it’s god’s word, and we know it’s god’s word because it says so in the bible, and therefor evolution can’t be right, and so we just have to keep looking till we find the proof that MUST be there, because of the bible.
Their conclusion was made LONG before the notion of evidence came around, and now they will sieze on ANYTHING to support their pre-determined viewpoints.
End of rant.
It was a rhetorical and ironic question (to you, me and most people on this site).
Always hard to tell, with the people I “meet” online. I tend to treat questions as honest unless I know otherwise.
the link between climate denial and creationism is close.
One of the criticisms against computer modelling that I’ve seen is that the coding is done by scientists, not professional programmers and the code quality is poor.
I wonder how much merit this has.
If true, it is a descent enough question but, my understanding is that many of the models (originally at least) were in FORTRAN. If it’s wrong, it wont run. However, whatever language they use, I would be amazed if they don’t get their code validated by others.
Over and beyond that, I would be tempted to say that the question may not actually be a decent one at all; at is merely designed to undermine public confidence in the integrity and professionalism of climate scientists.
sp. decent, not descent!
Perhaps but it should be addressed; the common man hears “computer models” and is more likely to think Angry Birds than Avatar.
Public confidence matters, especially when the elected reps are a shocking blend of clueless and heartless
Another point about public confidence – continued fallout from ClimateGate.
Here’s a new entry on Climate Audit:
http://climateaudit.org/2012/02/06/acton-tricks-the-ico/
Stuff like this does more to harm public confidence than any number of cold winter days
Would you rather the coding was done by programmers with qustioinable understanding of the science? Consider that a good programmer can create a really confincing simulation of almost any imaginary scenario.
As personal computer users, and information consumers, how are we to tell where to draw the line between a ‘Model’, and a ‘Simulation’?
It doesn’t have to be an either/or situation; the physicists and climatologists aren’t building their own supercomputers.
Gardeners in Oklahoma lost their crops when we had temperatures of 118 and their chickens just dropped over and died..they are beginning to to think I am not all that crazy to tell them”It is Global Warming..we better do something to stop it.That is why I bought a 500 gal water tank”.I am developing a hatred for our state climatologist who refuses to say”Global Warming”,,and he does the farm report.What about James Hansen’s study that the drought in Okla and Texas were caused by GW?
keep speaking the truth.
the polling data shows that skepticism has bottomed out, in part due to the obvious patterns of weather disruption visible to all.
This drought, while extreme, is not without precedent. My 90 year old grandfather lived through the ‘Dust Bowl’ years during the 1930s in Oklahoma. He describes the dust storms of that decade long drought as “Black Blizzards” And he says we “Ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!”
I’m not a “Denier”. But they never said anything about global warming back then. Eventually the rains came back. I don’t hear any climatologists saying that the causes of this drought are fundamentally different from that one. So I’m of the opinion that it is too soon to say that this current drought is anything more than an extreme but infrequent, and damaging, weather pattern.
go to the graphs on this page by the Texas state climatologist to see where 2011 stands against 1934.
http://climatecrocks.com/2011/08/30/graph-of-the-day-spot-the-outlier/
Thanks for the eye opener. But pulling a year out the middle of that drought and comparing it to a single year in this one still isn’t the complete picture.
The drought of the “dirty thirties” lasted a decade, and didn’t see any relief until 1941. So drought duration is an important part of the total picture too. I’m also interested in comparing conditions all over the country during the two droughts, and the conditions leading up to them. Got any more info that focuses on comparing the two?
a better comparison would be what’s happening all over the planet.
ie
melting arctic sea ice, shrinking ice sheets on greenland and antarctica, shrinking mountain glaciers worldwide, ocean acidification, changes in African and Asian monsoon rain patterns, and an overall increase in precipitation and drought extremes worldwide.
Hansen et al: “Extreme Heat Waves … in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 Were ‘Caused’ by Global Warming”
By Joe Romm on Jan 6, 2012 at 12:37 pm
“Climate dice,” describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons relative to climatology, have become progressively “loaded” in the past 30 years, coincident with rapid global warming. That’s the finding of a detailed climatological analysis by NASA’s James Hansen along with Makiko Sato and Reto Ruedy in which they attribute some of the uber-extreme heat waves to global warming.
from “Perceptions of Climate Change: The New Climate Dice“: