Report: Climate change worsens Western water woes
Climate change is likely to diminish already scarce water supplies in the Western United States, exacerbating problems for millions of water users in the West, according to a new government report.
A report released Monday by the Interior Department said annual flows in three prominent river basins “” the Colorado, Rio Grande and San Joaquin “” could decline by as much 8 percent to 14 percent over the next four decades. The three rivers provide water to eight states, from Wyoming to Texas and California, as well as to parts of Mexico.
The declining water supply comes as the West and Southwest, already among the fastest-growing parts of the country, continue to gain population.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar called water the region’s “lifeblood” and said small changes in snowpack and rainfall levels could have a major effect on tens of millions of people.
The report will help officials understand the long-term effects of climate change on Western water supplies, Salazar said, and will be the foundation for efforts to develop strategies for sustainable water resource management.
The broad-brush conclusion of a new federal report on the future impact of climate change on water in the West is a bit familiar. Throughout the West, there will be less snow, and what snow there is will melt faster. The dry Southwest is going to get drier, and the wet Northwest wetter, as a diagram in the report (above) shows.
The 122-page report includes original research “” “including state-of-the-art climate modeling,” as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said during a conference call on Monday “” but also harks back to peer-reviewed scientific literature on seven river basins: the Columbia, the Klamath, the Sacramento-San Joaquin, the Colorado, the Missouri, the Truckee and the Rio Grande.
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Gas Prices Slam Mobility — and Obama’s Popularity Too
The price of gasoline is damaging not just Americans’ finances and mobility — but the public’s broader economic sentiment, and with it,Barack Obama’s re-election prospects.
With gas up 26 percent this year to an average $3.88 a gallon, seven in 10 Americans in this ABC News/Washington Post poll report financial hardship as a result, six in 10 say they’ve cut back on driving — and, among those hardest hit, Obama’s ratings are suffering.
This poll, produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates, finds the president’s job approval rating 13 points lower among people who say the price of gas is causing them hardship. Forty-three percent of them approve of the president, vs. 56 percent of those who report no hardship. And among the four in 10 feeling “serious” hardship, just 39 percent approve of Obama’s work in office.
In re-election terms, 53 percent of those who are feeling serious hardship as a result of gas prices say they definitely will not vote for Obama in 2012 — 14 points more than say so among those who are feeling either less-than-serious hardship, or none at all.
Food Insecurity Looms in Parched Horn of Africa
A drought in the Horn of Africa, triggered by the same La Ni±a episode that caused massive flooding in Australia last year, is plunging millions of pastoralists closer to food insecurity.
Parts of Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and eastern Uganda are most affected. The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that 8.4 million people are in need of food aid in the region, according to spokesman David Orr. Thousands of livestock have already died in Kenya and Ethiopia from animal diseases associated with the drought. The severity this year will depend on the rainy season between March and May.
“It is too early to say yet, although the general view is [the rains] look like being quite poor in certain parts of Somalia and Ethiopia,” said Orr. “Combined with conflict and rising food prices in Somalia, this could be particularly serious in that country.”
The WFP is continuing its normal operations of providing a food basket of cereals to the regions but is underfunded by 56 percent for the April to September period, Orr said.
In a country such as Ethiopia — whose economy is expected to grow at 9 percent this year according to the Economist Intelligence Unit and lags just behind China and India at 8.1 percent per year in the period between 2011 and 2015, according to the IMF — there are concerns the La Ni±a episode could hamper growth in the short term.
Droghts are not new to the region. A massive one between 2008 and 2009 left 23 million people hungry and millions of livestock dead. And before that, droughts have taught pastoralists to become nomads, moving with their hardy animals in search of better grazing land.
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
The gas price is due to Speculators and the members of the commission who have delayed regulation to prevent such. Obama can change the balance this summer due to term expiration. Sorry, I forget the exact title of the commission.
Speaking of bad progressive messaging, why don’t they put the blame for high gas prices where it belongs?
[PurpleOzone]: “Speaking of bad progressive messaging, why don’t they put the blame for high gas prices where it belongs?”
Hear hear! God, polls make me depressed…
I see the Civil War revisionist Barbour has dropped out of contention for the GOP presidential nominee race. I don’t think his smack played too well above the Mason Dixon line.
>why don’t they put the blame for high gas prices where it belongs?
On the end user… If you dont like the price dont buy it.
Clearly the American public continuing to buy the most fuel inefficient cars in the world are going to have a hard time finding someone besides themselves to blame.
The huge surge in SUV sales after the last gas spike faded temporarily just shows how totally clueless Americans have become.
You buy an SUV and you also make a hidden commitment to buy 10,000 gallons of gas at whatever price Big Oil is going to sell it to you over the coming decade. Hello?
Where else do Americans take on a $30,000 to $90,000 (EU gas prices today) commitment with so little thought, knowledge or understanding?
If our government was serious about the oil threat they would require that every car sold includes on the window sticker the cost of gas to run the beast at $3, $6 and $9 a gallon. Then consumers could see that buying a fuel pig was a real threat.
Big Oil does not want car buyers to even think about how much they are signing up to spend in gas. And apparently the American government doesn’t think the oil crisis is a big enough threat to tell them.
Always annoying when people point out that china is the bad boy on emission and has overtaken the US.
It is obvious what is going on…..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/25/carbon-cuts-developed-countries-cancelled
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/04/greenhouse_gases?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/dc/costoftrade
http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/news/story/48876/historic-flooding-unfolding-al.asp
maybe us might get some aid from pakistan…
The 2070-2099 long term forecast for 20% higher precipitation in the northern Great Plains also raises some questions about agriculture.
If every year is like the spring of 2011, that could be a challenge.
In Illinois and Iowa this year’s corn planting has been delayed due to saturated soil conditions and cooler temperatures for this time of year. The lower Mississippi River valley is bracing for a 75-year flood.
Blaming rising gasoline prices upon the ever-mysterious evidently conspiratorial “speculators” ranks as one of the most successful examples of irrational propaganda. Oil and gasoline are commodities traded on the open market. Millions of people invest in these commodities and the vast majority of them are not engaged in any conspiracy, no more so than all the other stockholders wishing that their stocks will gain value over time are likewise engaged in a conspiracy.
Throughout the housing bubble the journalists said nothing whatsoever about evil speculators driving up the price of houses and the American people assumed that real estate prices must always rise. The real estate speculators — the house flippers and so forth — were glamorized by the news media and television programs. Nearly everyone assumed that real estate was a perpetual winner and would always remain so.
The housing market collapsed and eventually the public got around to conceding that the skyrocketing prices was a bubble, a byproduct of speculation by millions of otherwise well meaning yet naive Americans.
Is it proper to claim that the oil and gasoline market is experiencing the same?
No. Once the oil and gasoline are consumed and their byproducts fill the atmosphere with pollution these products are gone forever and therefore no longer available. The real estate bubble left millions of empty decaying houses but the oil market leaves only a legacy of pollution on a global scale.
The prices of oil and gasoline are rising but the speculators are not a fault. These commodities are finite and subject to exhaustion. Peak Oil has occurred. The demand for oil by the rising economies of China and India isn’t going to diminish in the years ahead.
What this means, essentially, is that the consumption of oil by the United States of America must decline dramatically. The price of oil and gasoline are rising specifically to bring about just this outcome.
The world is changing and there is no going back. The days of 99 cent a gallon gasoline are gone forever.
The automobile age will end … as will our civilization and humankind’s hopes for the future.
More Floods Ahead: Adapting to Sea Level Rise in New York City
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/rosenzweig_03/
Joe,
Accuweather home page looks like its straight from Hell & High Water….Texas on fire, Mississippi flooded… Arkansas Tornadoes
Architects of Change | Knowledge Network Energy solutions of the future?
http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=146891442047601&id=139434822741700
Special SPIEGEL Feature “ZERO” Bike
http://translate.google.de/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Fauto%2Ffahrkultur%2F0%2C1518%2C758568%2C00.html&sl=de&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8
An army equicked with electrrc bikes (vehicles in general) has profound advantages over conventional Co2 emitting guzzlers.
Did you hear them coming?
The town of Grantham in south east Queensland, the scene of four separate flooding events in as many months, one of them catastrophically claiming at least 21 human lives.
Of the 145 families that lived there, 14 have chosen to stay.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/04/27/3200926.htm
Pastoralists??? That’s an odd way to say “subsistence farmers” isn’t it?
I like Barry@5′s suggestion for the car window sticker
This looks like very high water. The Mississippi River is predicted to blow by record flooding below its confluence with the Missouri and Ohio Rivers. And it’s still raining very hard upstream. Here’s the prediction from the gage at Tipton, TN above Memphis.
http://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=meg&gage=tptt1&view=1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1“
ScienceDaily (Apr. 26, 2011) — It’s like a scene out of a sci-fi movie — thousands, possibly millions, of king crabs are marching through icy, deep-sea waters and up the Antarctic slope.
Shell-crushing crabs haven’t been in Antarctica, Earth’s southernmost continent, for hundreds or thousands, if not millions, of years, McClintock said. “They have trouble regulating magnesium ions in their body fluids and get kind of drunk at low temperatures.”
But something has changed, and these crustaceans are poised to move by the droves up the slope and onto the shelf that surrounds Antarctica.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110419191022.htm
Very thorough article! If you enjoy learning about climate change and its effect on our Earth, you may wanna check out Penn State’s Dr. Richard Alley, (featured in Earth: The Operators’ Manual), his colleagues and their studies! In our interviews and programs on the scientist and his colleagues, they discuss their theories on climate change, its harmful effects and what we can do to prevent further damage to our Earth. Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/h8EY6q
Take care.
- Carrie