Credit: Community Alliance with Family Farmers

After this year’s dismal snowpack survey predicted a serious water shortage for huge swaths of California’s farmland, some farmers are investigating an ancient technique called “dry farming.” As the Sacramento Bee highlighted last week, farmers in the Central Valley, which supplies a quarter of the American food supply, have started experimenting with conserving reservoir water and relying only on rainwater to sustain crops.

Dry farming is risky, as it requires farmers to gamble on rainfall, trap it in the soil, and sustain it for long dry spells. Much of the state experienced record low rainfalls in the past year. And climate change threatens to reduce precipitation even more. But immediate concern over the valley’s fast-depleting groundwater stores has prompted farmers to take the risk — with some success.

According to a study by the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, a 250-acre vineyard practicing dry farming in Napa has conserved roughly 64,000 gallons of water per acre each year. About 2,000 out of half a million acres of vineyards are dry-farmed.

Dry-farming, a common practice for centuries, seemed to dwindle in popularity in the past few decades as farmers relied more on surface irrigation. But proponents of the practice swear that dry-farmed crops, while smaller than their conventional counterparts, have more concentrated nutrients and stronger flavors due to lower water absorption.

The past year’s record low rainfall has left California farmers desperate for solutions. Bracing themselves for droughts that will only grow longer and more severe with climate change, farmers are looking for water-conserving alternatives to currently unsustainable practices. Besides dry-farming, farmers are adopting more efficient irrigation systems, creating water storage areas like on-farm ponds, and developing drought-resistant crops.

Farmers were hit hard by last year’s dry growing season, with yields in corn-heavy states plummeting to 30-year lows. The nation’s wheat and livestock supplies have also been decimated over the past year. The USDA has been forced to bail out drought-stricken farmers by buying up millions of pounds of meat. As a result, food prices are sky-high and many experts fear a global food shortage.

Related Post:

• Oxfam Warns Climate Change And Extreme Weather Will Cause Food Prices To Soar

A new U.S. Geological Survey study finds, “Warmer spring temperatures since 1980 are causing an estimated 20 percent loss of snow cover across the Rocky Mountains of western North America.”

The USGS explains, “The new study builds upon a previous USGS snowpack investigation which showed that, until the 1980s, the northern Rocky Mountains experienced large snowpacks when the central and southern Rockies experienced meager ones, and vice versa. Yet, since the 1980s, there have been simultaneous snowpack declines along the entire length of the Rocky Mountains, and unusually severe declines in the north.”

We reported on that previous work in 2011 — see “USGS: Global Warming Drives Rockies Snowpack Loss Unrivaled in 800 Years, Threatens Western Water Supply.” The USGS explained back then:

The warming and snowpack decline are projected to worsen through the 21st century, foreshadowing a strain on water supplies. Runoff from winter snowpack – layers of snow that accumulate at high altitude – accounts for 60 to 80 percent of the annual water supply for more than 70 million people living in the western United States.

What’s most worrisome is that we now have three major trends driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases that threaten to significantly worsen drought and water problems in the West and Southwest:

1. Less precipitation in many areas (see here)
2. Less snowpack, as the USGS studies have found
3. Hotter temperatures (see “We’re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temperatures — Imagine What’ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming“).

Assuming the anti-science crowd continue to block any serious action, these catastrophic changes will last a long, long time (see NOAA: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).

For the record, it was the possibility of losing the Sierra snowpack in the second half of the century that led then Energy Secretary Chu to warn in 2009, “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”

Geophysical Research Letters published the new research, “Regional patterns and proximal causes of the recent snowpack decline in the Rocky Mountains” (subs. req’d). Here are the key points from the USGS news release:

Read more

Due to sequestration, the federal government will be at least $115 million short of normal wildfire fighting capacity during this year’s wildfire season. This is particularly problematic as large portions of the U.S. face a serious drought and extremely dry conditions. As the Washington Post reported, Agriculture Secretary Vilsack said “I hope we can get through this fire season without any fatalities.”

A new report from the House Appropriation committee Democrats found that the Forest service “will have 500 fewer firefighters, 50-70 fewer fire engines, and two fewer aircraft because of sequestration.” Some of the equipment it does still have is outdated — such as the 50-years-old-on-average tanker planes that have crashed multiple times in the last decade, killing 14 people.

A Fox News radio AM talk show expressed incredulity that President Obama and Agriculture Secretary Vilsack “could not find $115 million of fat in the budget so they cut firefighters.” One of the more harmful aspects of sequestration is that the cuts take place “across-the-board” and do not permit the same flexibility in moving funds around within an agency.

Because last year’s wildfire season was so severe, the USDA Forest Service faced a $400 million shortfall for active firefighting and had to borrow money from fire prevention programs to cover the costs. These programs included paying for brush removal from public lands and protecting against invasive plants, disease, insect infestations, and fires. Eventually Congress reimbursed the Forest Service for the shortfall via the 2013 Continuing Resolution but the delays hurt prevention efforts. Last year’s fire season consisted of 67,700 fires burned 9 million acres.

This year, as of May 3, there have been 13,115 wildfires, burning 153,000 acres. Compounding the restraints posed by the inflexible sequester, agencies foresee a $700 million deficit in direct firefighting activities, so similar programs will be de-funded (such as a hazardous-fuels-reduction program to remove long-burning combustible materials from the path of fires).

Congress calculates wildfire suppression funds by averaging the cost over the last ten years. As climate change worsens drought year after year, this calculation becomes deficient. The wildfire season used to range between June and September, but has now expanded to include May and October.

The Western U.S. faces low mountain snowpack, and the most recent U.S. Seasonal Drought Monitor Outlook finds that “drought is forecast to either develop or persist across the western contiguous U.S. as this region enters its dry season.”

Dry conditions in nearly half the country make hampered fire management budgets and sequestration cuts even more dangerous for residents and will lead to even more shortfalls this season. A recent report found that climate change will double the area burned by wildfires by 2050.

Drought and wildfires, in addition to harming people and property, also have dramatic impacts on insects like monarch butterflies, as well as mammals, birds, reptiles, and nearly every plant in the region.

Local communities are trying to face climate adaptation issues alongside the federal government. Texas is preparing for record drought by creating a “rainy day” infrastructure water fund, though none of the legislators acknowledge that climate change is a primary cause of increasing droughts.

A recent report from the General Accounting Office found that the federal government needs to do a better job helping local governments adapt to climate change and integrate climate impacts into infrastructure planning. The report identified roads, bridges, wastewater systems, and federal facilities as particularly vulnerable. Sequestration makes it nearly impossible for the federal government to help local communities adapt to and prepare for climate change-fueled extreme weather and wildfires.

In September, NOAA put together a video showing how climate change means wet areas get wetter and dry gets drier. Now NASA has a video of their own with similar findings.

Here is a screen-shot (NASA didn’t make the video embeddable):

Model simulations spanning 140 years [video here] show that warming from carbon dioxide will change the frequency that regions around the planet receive no rain (brown), moderate rain (tan), and very heavy rain (blue). The occurrence of no rain and heavy rain will increase, while moderate rainfall will decrease. Credit: NASA.

The summer precipitation varies year by year, of course, but as the snapshot above shows, by mid-century there is basically no rain in much of the Southwest and California some years. And the Amazon is not looking too good either (see also “NASA-Led Study Finds Warming-Driven Megadroughts Jeopardizing Amazon Forest“).

NASA’s news release explains

“In response to carbon dioxide-induced warming, the global water cycle undergoes a gigantic competition for moisture resulting in a global pattern of increased heavy rain, decreased moderate rain, and prolonged droughts in certain regions,” said William Lau of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and lead author of the study….

Areas projected to see the most significant increase in heavy rainfall are in the tropical zones around the equator, particularly in the Pacific Ocean and Asian monsoon regions.

Some regions outside the tropics may have no rainfall at all. The models also projected for every degree Fahrenheit of warming, the length of periods with no rain will increase globally by 2.6 percent. In the Northern Hemisphere, areas most likely to be affected include the deserts and arid regions of the southwest United States, Mexico, North Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, and northwestern China. In the Southern Hemisphere, drought becomes more likely in South Africa, northwestern Australia, coastal Central America and northeastern Brazil.

“Large changes in moderate rainfall, as well as prolonged no-rain events, can have the most impact on society because they occur in regions where most people live,” Lau said.

This matches the findings of many other climate studies, including those on Dust-Bowlification:

• USGS on Dust-Bowlification
• NCAR analysis warns we risk multiple, devastating global droughts even on moderate emissions path
• My Nature Piece On Dust-Bowlification And the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security
• NOAA: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe.

Bowling Green Subway Station in New York, October 30, 2012, closed after Superstorm Sandy hit. (Credit: AP)

Scroll to the end of this post for an excellent infographic on this topic.

Superstorm Sandy devastated New Jersey, New York, and other areas along the eastern seaboard six months ago on October 29, 2012. It took at least 72 lives in the United States and caused nearly $50 billion in damages. Congress eventually provided $60 billion in disaster relief and recovery aid after weeks of deliberating and partisan bickering. These recovery efforts continue to this day.

Sandy was the worst natural disaster in the United States in terms of destruction and deaths since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, but it wasn’t the only one. In 2011 and 2012 alone, the United States experienced 25 floods, storms, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires that each caused at least $1 billion in damages. Combined, these extreme weather events were responsible for 1,107 fatalities and up to $188 billion in economic damages.

The Center for American Progress conducted an analysis and found that the federal government—which means taxpayers—spent $136 billion total from fiscal year 2011 to fiscal year 2013 on disaster relief. This adds up to an average of nearly $400 per household per year.

Nearly all of this disaster spending was for relief and recovery from these and other smaller natural disasters. Most of these disasters are symptomatic of the man-made climate change resulting from massive amounts of carbon emissions and other pollutants in the atmosphere, which warm the oceans and the Earth. As climate change accelerates, so will federal spending on disaster relief and recovery, which will ultimately be paid for by taxpayers.

The nearly $400 per household spent annually over the past three years could be the beginning of a very costly future as climate-related extreme weather multiplies. This issue brief explores federal spending on disaster relief and offers up recommendations for how we can respond to the potential growth in these expenditures.

Read more

Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress. Jackie Weidman is a Special Assistant on the Energy team at the Center. The authors would like to thank Cathleen Kelly, Senior Fellow, Mari Hernandez, Research Associate, and Mayhah Suri, intern, all at the Center, for their contributions to this analysis. This piece was reposted from CAP.

A 2010 study found “global warming is the main cause of a significant intensification in the North Atlantic Subtropical High that in recent decades has more than doubled the frequency of abnormally wet or dry summer weather in the southeastern United States.” Below, meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters relates how wild climate swings are becoming the norm in the Midwest, too.–JR

Runoff from heavy rains flooded parts of a cemetery in St. Louis County on April 18, 2013. (Photo credit: Robert Cohen)

By Jeff Masters, via Weather Underground

It seems like just a few months ago barges were scraping bottom on the Mississippi River, and the Army Corps of Engineers was blowing up rocks on the bottom of the river to allow shipping to continue. Wait, it was just a few months ago–less than four months ago! Water levels on the Mississippi River at St. Louis bottomed out at -4.57′ on January 1 of 2013, the 9th lowest water level since record keeping began in 1861, and just 1.6′ above the all-time low-water record set in 1940 (after the great Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s.)

But according to National Weather Service, the exceptional April rains and snows over the Upper Mississippi River watershed will drive the river by Tuesday to a height 45 feet higher than on January 1. The latest forecast calls for the river to hit 39.4′ on Tuesday, which would be the 8th greatest flood in history at St. Louis, where flood records date back to 1861. Damaging major flooding is expected along a 250-mile stretch of the Mississippi from Quincy, Illinois to Thebes, Illinois next week.

At the Alton, Illinois gauge, upstream from St.Louis, a flood height of 34′ is expected on Tuesday. This would be the 6th highest flood in Alton since 1844, and damages to commercial property in the town of Alton occur at this water level. In addition, record flooding is expected on at least five rivers in Illinois and Michigan over the next few days. A crest 1.5′ above the all-time record has already occurred on the Des Plaines River in Chicago. This river has invasive Asian Carp that could make their way into Lake Michigan if a 13-mile barrier along the river fails during an extreme flood. Fortunately, NPR in Michigan is reporting today that U.S. Army Corps of Engineers crews stationed along the 13-mile Asian carp barrier have seen no evidence of the fish breaching the structure, and it would have taken a flood much larger than today’s record flood to breach the structure. A crest on the Grand River in Grand Rapids, Michigan nearly 4′ above the previous record (period of record: at least 113 years) is expected this weekend. At this flood level, major flooding of residential areas is expected, though the flood wall protecting downtown Grand Rapids will keep the commercial center of the city from flooding.

Figure 1. The rains that fell in a 24-hour period ending at 7 am EDT Thursday, April 18, 2013 over Northern Illinois were the type of rains one would expect see fall only once every 40 years (yellow colors), according to METSTAT, Inc. (http://www.metstat.com.) METSTAT computed the recurrence interval statistics based on gauge-adjusted radar precipitation and frequency estimates from NOAA Atlas 14 Volume 2, published in 2004 (http://dipper.nws.noaa.gov/hdsc/pfds/.) METSTAT does not supply their precipitation recurrence interval forecasts or premium analysis products for free, but anyone can monitor the real-time analysis (observed) at: http://metstat.com/solutions/extreme-precipitation-index-analysis/

Damages from the April 2013 Midwest U.S. flood in Illinois, Michigan, and Missouri are likely to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of the impacts at the flood levels predicted include:

Read more

The biggest threat that climate change poses to humanity is Dust-Bowlification. So naturally the first and only country to withdraw from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is Canada, home of the Dust-Bowl-accelerating tar sands.

In 2011, the journal Nature asked me to write a Comment piece after they read one of my posts on prolonged drought and “Dust-Bowlification.” I argued that because of those threats, “Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.” (The photo is by Dorothea Lange, who was hired by the Farm Security Administration to help humanize the Dust Bowl.)

As the UNCCD explained in its response to the withdrawal last month:

The UNCCD is the only legally binding instrument that addresses desertification/land degradation and drought….

In June 2012, world leaders at Rio +20 declared land degradation and drought as some of the most serious global challenges impeding the sustainable development of all nations, especially developing countries…. They also reaffirmed their resolve, in accordance with the UNCCD, to take coordinated action nationally, regionally and internationally, to monitor, globally, land degradation and restore degraded lands in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas.

Global warming is projected to worsen and prolong droughts over much of the world — and to Dust-Bowlify as much as one third of the Earth’s currently habited and arable land. Certainly all nations have a moral obligation to work to reduce desertification, especially one like Canada that working to speed up climate change — see “Keystone XL Pipeline = Tar Sands Expansion = Accelerated Climate Change.”

And in case you were wondering whether Canada actually bothered to offer a legitimate reason for exiting this international effort, try this:

Canada defended its decision to pull out of a United Nations convention that fights the spread of droughts just a month before a major gathering would have forced the country to confront scientific analysis on the effects of climate change….

Harper said Thursday that the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification is too bureaucratic. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird called it a “talkfest” that does a disservice to taxpayers.

Canada is shocked, shocked that a U.N. Convention is a bureaucratic talk-fest. Seriously. What next, Canada withdraws from the Olympics because the games are “too competitive”?

This shameless move is yet one more reason for Obama to kill the Keystone pipeline.

Source: Environment America

The vast majority of Americans have experienced a weather-related disaster in the past six years, according to a report released today by the Environment America Research and Policy Center.

The report, which is based on disaster declaration data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, found that 243 million Americans — nearly four out of five — have lived in a county that has been hit by at least one federally declared weather-related disaster since 2007. The breadth and impact of these disasters, which include drought, tropical cyclones, flooding, tornadoes, wildfires and snow and ice storms, has been significant. According to the report:

• Every U.S. state besides South Carolina has experienced a weather-related disaster since 2007, and in 18 states and the District of Columbia, weather-related disasters have affected every county.
• More than 19 million Americans live in counties that have averaged one or more weather disaster per year since 2007.
• In 2012 alone, there were at least 11 disasters that caused more than $1 billion in damage, including Hurricane Sandy, which, with a price tag as high as $70 billion, was the costliest weather-related disaster in the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina.
• Eight U.S. counties in South Dakota, Oklahoma and Nebraska have been hit by ten or more weather disasters since the beginning of 2007.

The report notes that the frequency and intensity of several weather-related disasters has increased over the last several years and is predicted to continue increasing as the climate warms. Intense rainfall, for instance, has become more frequent in the U.S., with “the rainiest 1 percent of all storms delivering 20 percent more rain on average at the end of the 20th century than at the beginning,” and this increase is predicted to continue. And it’s likely the record-breaking heat waves, drought and wildfires that have gripped the country in the last few years will also become more common as the planet warms. The link between tornadoes and climate change is more tenuous and complicated (see here).

The report is in line with other studies of its kind — in February, a report from the Center for American Progress found that in 2011 and 2012, 43 states experienced extreme weather events that caused at least $1 billion in damage, and these events caused 1,107 fatalities and up to $188 billion in damage in total. To slow the increase of many kinds of extreme weather events, the Environment America report calls on federal and state governments to implement caps on greenhouse gases — especially on high-emitting sources, such as power plants and the transportation sector — and adopt goals of reducing emissions by at least 35 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and at least 85 percent by 2050.

Wildfires in the U.S. will be at least twice as destructive by 2050, burning around 20 million acres nationwide each year, according to a federal report released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Scientists from the U.S. Forest Service, who authored the report, found regions such as western Colorado — which already experienced its most destructive wildfire in history last summer — will face an even greater risk fire risk: those regions are expected to face up to a five-fold increase in acres burned by 2050.

The report’s findings are in line with previous studies on climate change’s relation to fire risk: a 2012 study found that wildfire burn season is two and a half months longer than it was 40 years ago, and that for every one degree Celsius temperature increase the earth experiences, the area burned in the western U.S. could quadruple. The findings are also in line with the observed impacts climate change is having on wildfires. Wildfires in 2012 burned a record 9.2 million acres in the U.S., and record-breaking heat and dry weather in Australia provided ideal conditions for at least 90 fires that raged through the country this January.

The report also outlines the other effects climate change will have on the forests of the U.S. The Rocky Mountain forests are expected to become hotter and drier as the planet warms, conditions that in addition to wildfires will lead to an increase in infestations of insects such as the bark beetle, which has already destroyed tens of millions of acres of U.S. forests. One species, the mountain pine beetle, has already killed 70,000 square miles of trees — area the size of Washington state. As winters become milder, weather becomes drier and higher elevations become warmer, bark beetles are able to thrive and extend their ranges northward. An increase in some species of bark beetle can actually increase the risk of forest fires in areas affected by the beetle — the study notes an outbreak of the mountain pine bark beetle, which attacks and kills live trees, created a “perfect storm” in 2006 in Washington, where affected lodgepole pines burned “with exceptionally high intensity.”

David Peterson, a U.S. Forest Service biologist who co-authored the report, told the Denver Post that the destruction the bark beetles have inflicted upon western forests in recent years has been unprecedented:

“We’re getting into extreme events that seem to be having more and more effects across broader landscapes.”

The report also predicts an increase of invasive plants and animals, as well as flooding and erosion due to increased rainfall, higher rain to snow ratios and more burned areas. It notes that U.S. forests offset 13 percent of the country’s carbon emissions, and as trees killed by insects and fire decompose, they’ll emit carbon themselves. Because of the sweeping impacts, the report, which is being finalized for the White House and Congress, calls on forest managers to make “climate-smart” practices, such as thinning fire-vulnerable forests, a priority.

A new report confirms that the extreme heat waves, floods, droughts and wildfires that have wracked Australia over the past decade have been exacerbated by climate change. The report, commissioned by the Australian government’s Climate Commission, makes clear that these weather events will only get worse in the coming years, and warns that health and emergency professionals as well as citizens must prepare for their impacts now.

The study’s chief commissioner Tim Flannery said the study’s results mean Australia needs to take action to slow climate change.

FLANNERY: Records are broken from time to time, but record-breaking weather is becoming more common as the climate shifts. Only strong preventative action, with deep and swift cuts in emissions this decade, can stabilize the climate and halt the trend towards more intense extreme weather.

The study examines five impacts of climate change that have already begun to affect Australia:

• Heat: Australia broke 123 weather records in 90 days this summer. In January, Sydney hit a record 114 degrees, and the south Australian town of Moomba hit 121.3 degrees. The report notes that in Australia, there has been more than three times the number of record hot days than record cold days in the past 10 years. The heat has majorly impacted the country: in 2009, a heatwave led to 980 heat-related deaths, which is three times the average mortality rate for heatwaves, and heat has contributed to bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.
• Rainfall: Extreme rainfall in Queensland in 2010 and 2011 led to record-breaking and damaging floods, which broke river height records at more than 100 observation stations. As temperature increases, the report found that the likelihood of torrential rainfall events will increase as well in some areas — a finding consistent with climate change predictions.
• Drought: Australia emerged from a decade-long drought in 2009, which was said to be the worst in the country’s history. The report states the drought was estimated to have caused an 80 percent reduction in grain production and a 40 percent reduction in livestock production, and climate models predict that rainfall in southern and eastern Australia will continue to decrease as the century progresses.
• Bushfires: Australia has seen an increase in fire weather (hot, dry, windy days) over the last 30 years, and the fire season in southeast Australia has extended into November and March. The Black Saturday fires of 2009 killed 173 people and cost about A$4.4 billion. As the duration of hot, dry days is likely to increase in much of Australia, wildfire risk is also predicted to go up.
• Sea level rise: Climate change has already contributed to a 21 centimeter rise in global sea levels, the report states, and  major flooding in 2005, 2006, 2009 and 2010 in Australia’s Torres Strait Islands were likely made more damaging by the increases in sea level.

The study confirms what climate scientists have warned for years — that climate change will likely lead to an increase in extreme weather events. It comes at a time when the effects of climate change are being felt not just in Australia, but around the world: Drastic melting of Arctic sea ice has been linked to a bitterly cold Spring in parts of Europe and North America that has devastated sheep farmers, and the record-breaking drought that affected more than half of the continental U.S. in 2012 is expected to continue into this spring and summer.