Thread: California's 100-year drought is CYCLICAL

California's 100-year drought

Megadroughts a threat to civilization

Megadroughts are extreme dry spells that can last for a decade or longer.

They have parched the West, including present-day California, long before Europeans settled the region in the 1800s.

California is in the third year of one of the state's worst droughts in the past century, one that's led to fierce wildfires, water shortages and restrictions, and potentially staggering agricultural losses.

The dryness in California is only part of a longer-term, 15-year drought across most of the Western USA, one that bioclimatologist Park Williams said is notable because "more area in the West has persistently been in drought during the past 15 years than in any other 15-year period since the 1150s and 1160s" — that's more than 850 years ago.

"When considering the West as a whole, we are currently in the midst of a historically relevant megadrought," said Williams, a professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York.

Megadroughts are what Cornell University scientist Toby Ault calls the "great white sharks of climate: powerful, dangerous and hard to detect before it's too late. They have happened in the past, and they are still out there, lurking in what is possible for the future, even without climate change." Ault goes so far as to call megadroughts "a threat to civilization."

WHAT IS A MEGADROUGHT?

Megadroughts are defined more by their duration than their severity. They are extreme dry spells that can last for a decade or longer, according to research meteorologist Martin Hoerling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Megadroughts have parched the West, including present-day California, long before Europeans settled the region in the 1800s.

Most of the USA's droughts of the past century, even the infamous 1930s Dust Bowl that forced migrations of Oklahomans and others from the Plains, "were exceeded in severity and duration multiple times by droughts during the preceding 2,000 years," the National Climate Assessment reported this year.

The difference now, of course, is the Western USA is home to more than 70 million people who weren't here for previous megadroughts. The implications are far more daunting.

Overall, "the nature of the beast is that drought is cyclical, and these long periods of drought have been commonplace in the past," according to Mark Svoboda, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Neb. "We are simply much more vulnerable today than at any time in the past. People can't just pick up and leave to the degree they did in the past."

Ault agrees that this long-term Western dry spell could be classified as a megadrought. "But this is not as bad as it could get," he warned.

How do scientists know how wet or dry it was centuries ago? Though no weather records exist before the late 1800s, scientists can examine paleoclimatic "proxy data," such as tree rings and lake sediment, to find out how much — or little — rain fell hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

At the most simplistic level, tree rings are wider during wet years and narrower during dry years.

"Prolonged droughts — some of which lasted more than a century — brought thriving civilizations, such as the ancestral Pueblo (Native Americans) of the Four Corners region, to starvation, migration and finally collapse, " Lynn Ingram, a geologist at the University of California-Berkeley, wrote in her recent book The West Without Water.

Ault says decade-long droughts happen once or twice a century in the Western USA, but much worse droughts, ones that last for multiple decades, occur once or twice per millennium.

Has California reached megadrought status? Not yet: "This one wouldn't stand out as a megadrought," Hoerling said. Even so, "this is the state's worst consecutive three years for precipitation in 119 years of records," he said.

As of Aug. 28, 100% of the state of California was considered to be in a drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. More than 58% is in "exceptional" drought, the worst level. Record warmth has fueled the drought as the state sees its hottest year since records began in 1895, the National Climatic Data Center reports.

Because of the dryness, Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown declared a statewide drought emergency this year. Since then, reservoir storage levels have continued to drop, and as of late August, they were down to about 59% of the historical average.

Regulations restricting outdoor water use were put in place in late July for the entire state. People aren't allowed to hose down driveways and sidewalks, nor are they allowed to water lawns and landscapes (if there is excess runoff). There are reports of wells running dry in central California.

About 1,000 more wildfires than usual have charred the state, including some unusual ones in the spring.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/weathe...ught/14446195/

http://www.alipac.us/f19/seven-state...-water-303417/

1. Mt. Shasta mudslide blamed on drought, melting glacier
   
   Los Angeles Times ‎- 4 hours ago
   California's prolonged drought is believed to have caused a massive mudslide on Mt. Shasta over the weekend after meltwater from a glacier ...

http://www.alipac.us/f19/ca-melted-g...shasta-311345/

LOS BANOS, CA. — So much ground water is being pumped from the San Joaquin Valley that it's causing a massive swath of Merced County's surface to sink at an alarming rate, U.S. Geological Survey researchers revealed Thursday.

Parts of Merced near El Nido have dropped more than 21 inches in just two years. And researchers warn the deepening sinkhole now is spreading across 1,200 square miles -- from the cities of Merced on the north, to Los Banos on the west, Madera on the east and Mendota on the south...

http://www.alipac.us/f19/1-200-squar...rowing-292675/

• Heat Wave Causes Power Demand To Soar In California
  
  
  
• Heat Wave to Bring Potentially Record-Breaking Temperatures to Southern California
  

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• http://www.alipac.us/f19/warmer-than...-diego-310792/

These Are The Texas Towns Running Out Of Water

September 13th, 2013 by Jo Borrás



A month after the story broke, the people of West Texas are, literally, praying for rain. The region has experienced heavy droughts in recent years. Despite the droughts, however, Texas is famous for denying the science behind things like climate change and evolution, and also for voting over and over again to de-regulate the oil and gas companies that are consuming the area’s water supply with fracking.

The sad truth, though? Faced with the certainty that the fracking they voted for has pushed their habitat too far past the tipping point and an uncaring state government that denies such a basic tenet of reality as causation, what can the people of Texas do except pray?

You can read more about this latest fracking-related environmental catastrophe below, in an article that originally appeared on our sister site, Gas 2.

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Texas Fracking Update: Barnhart, TX is Out of Water



Beverly McGuire has lived in Barnhart, TX for more than thirty years. Like many Texans, she probably didn’t give fracking much thought before her town ran out of water. “The day that we ran out of water I turned on my faucet and nothing was there and at that moment I knew the whole of Barnhart was down the tubes,” she said in a Guardian interview last month, blinking back tears. “I went, ‘Dear God, help us.’ That was the first thought that came to mind.”

Despite those prayers, however, Texas has suffered years of sustained drought. On top of that, the oil and gas industry’s demand for water used in fracking are running down reservoirs and aquifers, and contaminating whatever’s left. Rapidly-increasing climate change is working against Texas’ cattle industry, as well, making things even worse for the people of West Texas towns like Barnhart, and any other towns in Briscoe, Burnet, or Comal counties.

As we reported last month, about 30 communities across West Texas could be out of water before the end of this year, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality‘s September 4th update to their drought report. As a nod to the commenters who doubted the veracity of that article because the facts came from “some chick expert” and I didn’t “name the towns”, here are a few of the towns listed as running out of water in “180 days”, “90 days”, and “45 days”. It’s not a complete list, nor does it tell the whole story, but the message is clear:fracking is killing Texas.

Here’s the list …

… and the key to the chart breaks down something like this …

• E – Emergency – Could be out of water in 45 days or less.
• P – Priority – Could be out of water in 90 days or less.
• C – Concern – Could be out of water in 180 days or less.
• W – Watch – Has greater than a 180 day supply of water remaining.

http://cleantechnica.com/2013/09/13/fracking-update-these-are-the-texas-towns-running-out-of-water/

STUDY: Warmer Pacific Ocean Temps Due to Natural Changes in Wind...