Posts
Human-Caused
Climate Change and Desperately Drilling For Water: The Deepening Dust
Bowlification of California
24
June, 2014
There
is no relief for poor California.
To
the west, a heat dome high pressure system sits its dry and
desiccating watch, deflecting storm systems northward toward Canada,
Alaska, and, recently, even the Arctic Ocean. It is a weather system
that drinks deep of Northwestern Pacific waters heated to 2-4+ C
above average by humankind’s extraordinary greenhouse gas
overburden. A mountain of dense and far hotter than normal air that
is shoving the storm-laden Jet Stream at a right angle away from the
US west coast and on up into an Arctic Ocean unprepared for the
delivery of such a high intensity heat and moisture flow.
(Not one, not two, but three high pressure centers stacking up on June 24, 2014 off the North American West Coast. The highs are indicated by the white, clockwise swirls on this GFS surface graphic. This triple barrel high pressure heat dome represents an impenetrable barrier to storms moving across the Pacific Ocean. You can see one of these storms, represented by the purple, counter-clockwise swirl approaching Alaska and the Aleutians. A second Pacific-originating storm is visible north of Barrow in the Beaufort Sea. Under a typical pattern, these storms would have funneled into the US west coast or skirted the Alaskan Coast before riding into Canada. Storms taking a sharp left turn through Alaska and the Bering Sea into the Arctic is an unprecedented and highly atypical weather pattern. Image source: Earth Nullschool. Data Source: NOAA/GFS.)
In
the far north, today, at noon local time, in the Mackenzie Delta
region of the extreme northwest section of Canada on the shores of
the Arctic Ocean, temperatures rose to 80 degrees Fahrenheit, 2-3
degrees hotter than areas of South Dakota and Iowa hundreds of miles
to the south. It is a temperature departure 20-25 degrees F above
average for this time of year. Far
to the south and east, yesterday saw a garden variety pop up
thunderstorm turn into a record-shattering rain event for Savannah
Georgia, one that dumped 4-10 inches of rain over the region,
over-topped ponds, flooded streets, knocked out power and washed out
rail lines.
In some sections of the city, hourly rates of rainfall were on the
order of 4-5 inches. One might expect such a rainfall rate from the
most moisture dense and intense tropical storms or hurricanes. The
Savannah event was a summer shower driven into a haywire extreme by a
heat-facilitated over-loading of the atmosphere with moisture.
What
do the west coast blocking pattern, the California Drought, the
Mackenzie Delta Arctic heatwave and the Savannah summer shower turned
monster storm have in common? Twelve words: hydrological cycle and
jet stream patterns wrecked by human caused atmospheric warming.
Three
Year Long Drought Intensifies
Californians,
at this time, may well be hoping hard for a mutant summer shower like
the one that hit Savannah yesterday. But they won’t be getting it
anytime soon. The triple barrel high off the US west coast won’t
move or let the rains in until something more powerful comes along to
knock it out of the way. And the only hope for such an event might
come in the form of a monster El Nino this winter. Then, Californians
may beg for the rain to stop. But, for now, they’re digging in
their heels to fight the most intense drought in at least a hundred
years.
(This week’s California Drought Map provided by the US Drought Monitor. Orange indicates severe drought, red indicates extreme drought, and that brick color spreading from the coast and into California’s Central Valley is what they call exceptional drought. Not a corner of the state is spared severe or higher drought levels, with fully 77% of the state suffering from extreme or exceptional drought.)
With
no rain in sight, with the snows all gone from the Sierra Nevada
mountains to the east, and with both federal and state reservoirs
under increasingly more stringent water restrictions, what it means
for Californians is incessant drilling. So far this year an estimated
450 million dollars has been spent statewide to plunge ever-deeper
wells into the state’s rapidly-dwindling underground aquifers. In
regions where a 200 foot well was once considered deep, 600, 800 or
even 1000 foot wells are now common.
In
total, about 75% of California’s lost water supply has been
replaced by what essentially amounts to mining ground water. But the
drought mitigating flow can only last for so long. And if the rains
don’t come, those sources will first dwindle and then dry up. So
California’s agriculture and a decent chunk of its other industry
may well be living on borrowed time facilitated by unsustainable
drilling for water.
Communities
local to the Central Valley region are already facing imminent loss
of water supplies. Tom
Vanhoff a Chowchilla local noted to CBS in a recent interview:
“I’m
in a community out there with about 20 homes. We’re on one deep
well ourselves and we lost it two years ago. We were at 200 feet and
now we are down to 400 but all these new guys are going down to six,
800 and 1000 feet; it’s going to suck us dry here again pretty
soon.”
So
for Central Valley residents it’s literally a race to the bottom in
the form of who can dig the deepest well the fastest.
Above
ground, a once lush landscape is now parched and brittle. Most
natives, even the octogenarians, have never seen it this dry. More
and more, the productive Central Valley is being described as a dust
bowl. In this case, Dust-Bowlification,
a term Joe Romm of Climate Progress coined to describe the likely
desertification of many regions as a result of human-caused warming,
is hitting a tragically high gear for California.
(Sierra Nevada Mountains in right center frame shows near zero snow cover on June 24 of 2014. Typically, California relies on snow melt to stave off water shortages through dry summers. This year, with drought conditions extending into a third year, snow melt had dwindled to a trickle by mid June. Sattelite Imagery provided by NASA LANCE MODIS.)
Global
Warming to Raise Food Prices
For
years, scientific models had shown that the US Southwest was
vulnerable to increased drought under human-caused warming.
Scientists warned that increased community resiliency combined with
rapid reductions in global carbon emissions would be necessary to
preserve the productiveness of regions vital to the nation.
California
is one such region. Its economy, even outside the greater US, is the
8th richest in the world. It is also the US’s largest producer of
vegetables, most fruits, and nuts. Other major agricultural
production for the state includes meat, fish, and dairy.
Though
much of the current drought’s impacts have been mitigated through
unsustainable drilling for ground water, US meat and produce prices
are expected to rise by another 3-6% due to impacts from the ongoing
and intensifying California drought. But so far, major impacts due to
large-scale reductions in total acres planted have been avoided.
Without the drilling, overall repercussions would have been
devastating, as planted areas rapidly dwindled in size. But with
wells running dry, time appears to be running out.
Links:
Hat
Tip to Colorado Bob
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