The worst direct impacts to humans from our unsustainable use of energy — over the next few decades — will, I think, be Dust-Bowlification and extreme weather and food insecurity:  Hell and High Water.

But all of the impacts occurring simultaneously will have an even more devastating synergy (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts“).  It means the rich countries will be far less likely to be offering much assistance to the poorer ones, since there will be ever worsening catastrophes everywhere simultaneously so we’ll be suffering at the same time.  Heck, this deep economic downturn and the record-smashing disasters of the past two years has already exacerbated media myopia and compassion fatigue to help those around the world staggered by floods and droughts.

And that suggests another deadly climate impact — far more difficult to project quantitatively because there is no paleoclimate analog — may well affect far more people both directly and indirectly: war, conflict, competition for arable and/or habitable land.

We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children. That means avoiding decades if not centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source — if not the source — of two of our biggest recent wars.

Last November, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan “said rising temperatures and rainwater shortages are having a devastating effect on food production. Failing to address the problem will have repercussions on health, security and stability.”

The NYT reported in 2009:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

That’s a key reason 33 generals and admirals supported the comprehensive climate and clean energy jobs bill in 2010, asserting “Climate change is making the world a more dangerous place” and “threatening America’s security.”  The Pentagon itself has made the climate/security link explicit in its Quadrennial Defense Review.

Sadly, the chance that humanity will avert catastrophic climate impacts has dropped sharply in the past two years (see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2“).  And that means it is increasingly likely we face a world beyond 450 ppm atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, which in turn means we likely cross carbon cycle tipping points that threaten to quickly take us to 800 to 1000 ppm — a world of rapid warming and a ruined climate far outside the bounds of any human experience.

Read more

“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.”

Last year, the journal Nature asked me to write a Comment piece after they read one of my posts on prolonged drought and “Dust-Bowlification.” The article was published October 27, 2011 (here, subs. req’d).

Since six months have passed, I can reprint the entire piece on ClimateProgress (see below).

This was my first piece ever in the journal itself.  I did have an online piece, “Nature publishes my climate analysis and solution.”  This is not a peer-reviewed article but rather a “Comment” piece.

I sent it to five of the world’s leading authorities on climate change and drought and the hydrological cycle:  Kevin Trenberth, Aiguo Dai, Michael Mann, Peter Gleick and Jonathan Overpeck.  I endeavored to incorporate their comments, but unfortunately Nature has a 10-reference limit for their Comment pieces so I wasn’t able to include as many references as they suggested or as I would have liked.  If you want links to most of the articles I refer to, go here.

I was particularly delighted that Overpeck liked the term “Dust-Bowlification.”  He really was an inspiration for me to begin studying this topic many years ago when I saw a 2005 presentation of his, “Warm climate abrupt change–paleo-perspectives,” that concluded “climate change seldom occurs gradually” (see The “global-change-type drought” and the future of extreme weather).

I was equally delighted Nature has basically endorsed this term through its multiple appearances in this article and felt that the overall issue warranted more attention.

I do not believe that most Americans — and that includes most policymakers and the media — understand the convergence of the recent scientific literature on the extreme threat posed directly to this country of Dust-Bowlification (see “Climate Story of the Year: Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security“).

I am glad that leading climatologists like James Hansen are starting to talk more about the threat posed by drought — since it is painfully clear that even some people considered climate experts are unaware of the literature (see “James Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now“).

As I wrote in the article:

Human adaptation to prolonged, extreme drought is difficult or impossible. Historically, the primary adaptation to dust-bowlification has been abandonment; the very word ‘desert’ comes from the Latin desertum for ‘an abandoned place’. During the relatively short-lived US Dust-Bowl era, hundreds of thousands of families fled the region. We need to plan how the world will deal with drought-spurred migrations and steadily growing areas of non-arable land in the heart of densely populated countries and global bread-baskets. 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.

Now, Dust-Bowl conditions could stretch all the way from Kansas to California by mid-century. America’s financial future and the health and safety of our people are at serious risk if greenhouse gas pollution is not brought under control quickly.  The food security of all of humanity is at risk. Denial is simply not an option, the time for action is now.

Here is the whole article:

Read more

The response by NOAA’s Martin Hoerling to James Hansen’s recent op-ed does not reflect the scientific literature.

I’m traveling, so let me focus first on Hoerling’s incorrect statements — posted on this blog and DotEarth — about drought. As readers know, the journal Nature asked me to write a Comment piece on the threat posed by drought after they read one of my posts examining the latest science on prolonged drought and “Dust-Bowlification.”

The Nature article, which is basically a review of recent drought literature, is here (subs. req’d). Most of the text is here.

The research I did for that article — along with the comments of the expert reviewers I sent it to — is why I know Hoerling is quite wrong. Hoerling begins by quoting Hansen’s recent New York Times Op-Ed piece:

“Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.”

Hoerling then asserts:

He doesn’t define “several decades,” but a reasonable assumption is that he refers to a period from today through mid-century. I am unaware of any projection for “semi-permanent” drought in this time frame over the expansive region of the Central Great Plains. He implies the drought will be due to a lack of rain (except for the brief, and ineffective downpours)….

But facts should, and do, matter to some. The vision of a Midwest Dustbowl is a scary one, and the author appears intent to instill fear rather than reason.

That’s a very serious attack on Hansen — if it were true. But it isn’t, and it should be retracted.

The fact is that the recent literature examining warming-driven drought in America could not be clearer in warning about a “semi-permanent” (or worse) drought in both the South West and the Central Great Plains and “More and more of the Midwest.” Here are two studies that lay things out starkly:

• Aiguo Dai of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, “Drought under global warming: a review” (2010)
• Michael Wehner et al., “Projections of Future Drought in the Continental United States and Mexico” (2011)

I would also add the 2010, Environmental Research Letters article “Characterizing changes in drought risk for the United States from climate change.”

And that’s not even counting the Journal of Geophysical Research study that Hansen himself co-authored in 1990, “Potential evapotranspiration and the likelihood of future drought,” which projected that severe to extreme drought in the United States, then occurring every 20 years or so, could become an every-other-year phenomenon by mid-century.

As an important aside, contrary to what Hoerling states, Hansen was not implying the drought will be due to lack of rain (by itself). Everyone seriously writing about warming-driven drought knows we are talking about a combination of factors, ones that I laid out in my Nature article:

Precipitation patterns are expected to shift, expanding the dry subtropics. What precipitation there is will probably come in extreme deluges, resulting in runoff rather than drought alleviation. Warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil, leading to a further increase in air temperature. That is why, for instance, so many temperature records were set for the United States in the 1930s Dust Bowl; and why, in 2011, drought-stricken Texas saw the hottest summer ever recorded for a US state. Finally, many regions are expected to see earlier snowmelt, so less water will be stored on mountain tops for the summer dry season.

Obviously, since Hansen coauthored an article titled, “Potential evapotranspiration and the likelihood of future drought,” we know he understands the drought conditions are driven by more than precipitation changes. The whole point of that 1990 paper was to examine the impact of warming-driven evaporation on soil moisture and drought.

It is quite surprising that Hoerling doesn’t appear to know the drought literature given that, as Revkin notes, he “runs an effort by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to assess the forces contributing to extreme weather events!”

Hoerling says it is reasonable to assume Hansen means “a period from today through mid-century.” Hansen says the “semi-permanent drought” will develop “over the next several decades.” That would clearly seem to mean that these conditions will evolve by just after mid-century, the 2050s and 2060s. This is also the first period of time where aggressive action to reduce emissions today could substantially change the projected climate.

Dai’s analysis does indeed project drought conditions over the Great Plains and Midwest. He is in the process of revising his analysis, but the figure below (which had been his 2030s projection in his original version) is a rough representation of where his analysis projects things will be in Hansen’s time frame for the U.S.

The PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade (see here).

And this isn’t just Dai’s finding. Michael Wehner et al. find the drying has the same signature. The study is behind a firewall, but you can see a PDF of a  PowerPoint presentation here.

Of course, just because several models project this future doesn’t make it a certainty.  As I note in the article, “drought models need to be improved. They successfully chart the hydrological changes seen in the US Southwest and the drying seen at the global level⁷, but regional predictions can be disturbingly variable.”

On the other hand, these models most certainly are not the worst-case scenario. Dai is modeling A1B (720 ppm), whereas we are on track for worse than that. A  plausible worst-case scenario is here (and below):  Royal Society Special Issue on Global Warming Details ‘Hellish Vision’ of 7°F (4°C) World — Which We May Face in the 2060s!

Hansen’s use of the term “Dust Bowl” is justified since that is the term widely used in the drought literature (see below). We are talking conditions that become as bad as the original Dust Bowl by mid-century and then get much, much worse for a long, long time. The Nature editors made repeated use of the term “Dust-Bowlification,” and I was particularly delighted that one of the leading experts in the field that I sent the piece to, Jonathan Overpeck, also liked the term.

Indeed, Hoerling’s critique is really only about whether the semi-permanent drought conditions will extend outside the U.S. SW to include most of Northern U.S. Great Plains. The literature is very clear that the Southwest is very likely headed for Dust Bowl conditions:

Read more

Corn farmers concerned about the impact of climate change are speaking out, calling the problem “a grave threat” to the nation’s agricultural sector.

Responding to the increase in severe weather — and the prospects for a “quantum jump” in such devastating events — a group of corn farmers is renewing calls for policies to help cut global warming pollution.

The American Corn Growers Association is highlighting statements made by its former president, saying that farmers are “at the front lines of global warming”:

Bolin, who farms near Manlius, Illinois, and who served as president of American Corn Growers Association from 2004 – 2012, said he felt there was no doubt that the weather has become more extreme, with high rainfall and severe droughts more prevalent today. He expressed concern for the ability of farmers to deal with and adapt to the changing environment. Bolin urges public policy to further develop alternative renewable energy resources, along with efforts to educate and inform agricultural producers to prepare for and adapt to the changing environment, to ensure adequate food and energy production.

“There’s simply no substitute for good soil and a stable climate for growing crops,” Bolin said. “That puts farmers at the front lines of global warming — it’s a grave threat to rural livelihoods and quality of life. That’s why I support EPA policies to cut global warming pollution from automobiles and power plants.”

The ACGA has been a strong supporter of climate policies. In 2009, led by Bolin, the organization put its support behind the comprehensive climate bill that eventually failed in Congress.

As a new report from Environment Illinois shows, the impact of intensifying extreme weather on the agricultural sector is substantial. Record-breaking floods along the Missouri River caused more than $200 million in crop damages in Iowa last year; the recent warming-induced drought in Texas cost farmers in the state more than $7 billion; and a sudden shift from extremely wet conditions to extremely dry conditions in the Midwest reduced corn yields by a billion bushels in 2011.

Of course, the agricultural sector also plays a major role in climate change. Farming operations across the U.S. represented about 6.2% of all greenhouse gas emissions in 2011, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. And agriculture was responsible for about 29% of all methane emissions — a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Related Post:

• Climate Story of the Year: Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security

Two of Southeast Asia’s most valuable crops — rice and cassava — are under pressure from multiple, simultaneous threats fueled by climate change.

In the last week, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security issued two pieces of research highlighting the devastating impacts that warming-fueled extreme weather is having on Asia’s agriculture.

The first piece of research looks at the impact of floods and droughts on Southeast Asia’s rice crops. According to researchers, severe flooding and drought throughout the region could reduce agricultural yields by up to 50% in the next three decades.

So-called “weather whiplash” — back-to-back extreme weather events — is already hitting rice crops hard. In 2010, Thailand experienced $450 million in crop damages due to a severe drought. The following year, flooding again decimated rice crops, causing $40 billion in damages throughout the country’s economy.

With Southeast Asia now the “rice bowl” of the world, acceleration of warming-fueled extreme weather would make the local and global economic impact of these disasters enormous:

South and Southeast Asia are home to more than one-third of the world’s population and half of the world’s poor and malnourished. Absent new approaches to food production, climate change in this region is expected to reduce agriculture productivity by as much as 50 percent in the next three decades. And with agriculture serving as the backbone of most economies in the region, such plunging yields would shake countries to the core.

Now, the growing variability between seasons has increased pressures on water supplies, while at the same time rising sea levels are tainting freshwater supplies with high levels of salinity. This troublesome combination is putting Asia’s tremendous rice production at risk. Rice in Asia is grown in vast low-lying deltas and coastal areas such as the Mekong River delta, which produces more than half of Vietnam’s rice; the rise in sea level from climate change will change the hydrology and salinity of these fields. Moreover, some of the major river basins—including the Chao Phraya in Thailand and the Red in Vietnam—are considered “closed” because all of the water flow has been claimed.

Warming temperatures and changing weather patterns are also spawning new outbreaks of pests in the region, threatening the multi-billion dollar cassava industry.

Cassava is a root used for a variety of food products, animal feed and biofuels. Last year, Thailand exported about $1.4 billion worth of cassava — or roughly 60% of the country’s exports. Cassava farmers in the region already deal with multiple types of pests. But Researchers at CGIAR and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture say new types of non-native pests are emerging:

For cassava in Southeast Asia, mealybugs and whiteflies are already endemic in the region. But new threats, such as the tiny green mite (Mononychellus mcgregori), are already emerging, says the research, published recently in the scientific journal Tropical Plant Biology.

“The cassava pest situation in Asia is pretty serious as it is,” said Tony Bellotti, a cassava entomologist at CIAT. “But according to our studies, rising temperatures could make things a whole lot worse.”

“One outbreak of an invasive species is bad enough, but our results show that climate change could trigger multiple, combined outbreaks across Southeast Asia, Southern China and the cassava-growing areas of Southern India,” added Belloti. “It’s a serious threat to the hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers for whom cassava is a lifeline, and their main source of income.”

The combined impact of extreme weather and pest outbreaks could be catastrophic for the region’s agricultural sector.

With more than half a billion people, Southeast Asia is one of the fastest growing regions in the world. According to the United Nations, the economic impact of a “business-as-usual” increase in emissions could cause a roughly 6.7% decline in the region’s GDP by 2100.

Related Post:

• Climate Story of the Year: Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security
• Oxfam Predicts Climate Change will Help Double Food Prices by 2030: “We Are Turning Abundance into Scarcity”

“Food insecurity and climate change are already inhibiting human wellbeing and economic growth throughout the world, and these problems are poised to accelerate,” John Beddington, who chaired the commission, said….

Other stories below: Fears grow over pollution risk from North Sea gas rig; Top 10 states for renewable power; Scientists warn of climate-change onslaught; Tim DeChristopher In Isolated Confinement

How to Fight Food Insecurity, Even in a Changing Climate

About 800 million people worldwide do not get enough food to eat, while about 1.5 billion are overweight. As the global population expands by an additional 2 billion people by 2050 and climate change alters traditional agricultural areas, scientists and policy makers are racing to figure out how to address both problems….

This uneven food landscape is not caused solely by government regulations or farming practices, but stems from many powerful forces—forces that are expected to keep increasing. “Several converging threats—from climate change, population growth and unsustainable use of resources—are steadily intensifying pressure on humanity and world governments to transform the way food is produced, distributed and consumed,” wrote the authors of a new report, published online March 28, from the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change….

One of the major concerns worldwide is increasing production on ever-dwindling acres of farmable land. The world’s farms continue to put out some 2.2 percent more food each year, but that is hardly on pace to keep up with growing global demand. And, many experts argue, these expansions need to be done in a sustainable way if people are to be fed without dragging down the economy—or the environment.

Read more

The revolution will be televised. So will the post-apocalyptical fight to feed ourselves on a ruined planet.

Those are two key themes of the wildly popular YA trilogy that begins with The Hunger Games, whose movie version comes out this week. The trailer gives the key plot points:

After what seems to be a climate-driven apocalypse, Panem, “the country that rose up out of the ashes of the place it was once called North America,” is divided into a Capitol and 12 districts, who launched a failed revolution many decades earlier.

The annual Hunger Games are televised and the rules are simple:

In punishment for the uprising, each of the 12 districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes to participate. The twenty-four tributes  will be imprisoned in the vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen wasteland. Over a period of several weeks, the competitors must fight to the death. The last tribute standing wins.

The winner “receives a life of ease back home, and their district will be showered with prizes, largely consisting of food,” all year round.

This is “Bread and Circuses” combined — by design — since that famous phrase comes from the Latin panem et circenses (also “bread and games”).

The books have sold some 10 million copies globally — and the author, Suzanne Collins, is the “best-selling Kindle author of all time.” They are a shrewd combination of standard YA fare — another love triangle between a girl and two boys … really? — and pop-culture riffs.  You have the extreme version of reality shows like American Idol and Survivor.  You have the young girl who reluctantly grows into a ferocious killer, which started with Buffy and Nikita (if you have to ask…) and now seems to be found in almost every other movie.

The books also had some fortunate timing for the author in terms of catching the zeitgeist, since perhaps the core theme is the 99% (the 12 districts) vs. the 1% (Capitol), the poor and underfed vs. the rich and overfed.

I try to stay on top of the latest in post-apocalypse pop culture, mainly because there has been so little of it in recent years — see Apocalypse Not: The Oscars, The Media And The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate. And when I heard the most popular new YA book series was built around food insecurity, I couldn’t resist. After all, as I’ve written in the journal Nature, “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 Hunger Games makes that challenge a literal and hyper-violent one. But like much (though not all) post-apocalyptic fiction, the book spends exceedingly little time actually explaining to anyone how we got in this mess.

Indeed, after reading all 3 books, I find only one sentence devoted to explaining what caused the apocalypse:

[The mayor]  tells of the history of Panem. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts…”

Sounds a lot like global warming, though the books do not flesh out what happened.

Read more