Underpaid Genius

I have become so used to the disconnect between reportage on the political economy and the ecology that I always look for ecological problems where the worst economic and political disruptions are taking place. Case in point? Spain. Behind the austerity theater going on in Europe are some bewildering disconnects.

Spain at risk of becoming like Sahara

Green groups slam Madrid for refusing to blame construction as 17 tonnes of fertile land are lost a year to the advancing desert

OVER a third of Spain is in danger of “turning into the Sahara”.

As it launched a 26-billion-euro action plan to battle desertification, the government has highlighted 37 per cent of the total surface area of the country considered to be at high risk of Saharization.

In particular it highlighted five areas – Almeria, the Canary Islands, Murcia, Alicante and parts of Castilla y Leon – as being in particular danger.

The study, which has taken 12 years to produce, blames the overuse of aquifers as one of the main culprits of land erosion.

It also cites the loss of woodland, decreasing rainfall and increasing temperatures as Spain loses an average of 17 tonnes of fertile land a year to desertification.

To combat the threat, the government aims to improve the country’s irrigation network.

It will also be setting aside money to restore aquifers and re-forest certain key areas.

The government is also setting up a Desertification Observatory, a quango to study ways to halt erosion.

But the action plan has already been criticised for not blaming the construction industry in the widespread destruction of the country.

“Despite Spain being one of the countries most affected by desertification, it does not deal with the loss of fertile land to widespread construction projects.” said a spokesman for Ecologistas en Accion. “It is insufficient but better than nothing,”

The significant drop of rainfall has made August the hottest on record, according to statistics. Like July, August was also two degrees above average temperatures.

The three warmest years in the region have all been in the last decade.

The continuing drought is now causing the threat of rationing early next year for Malaga city and most towns in the Guadalhorce valley.

It is the first time the threat has been made in the area.

With reservoirs currently at just 20 per cent, the Junta has made further pleas to residents to use water carefully.

In Cartama meanwhile, mayor Jose Garrido issued an edict to conserve water. He said: “Our reserves are on the limit and to ensure the town does not lose its supply it is crucial that we don’t waste water.”

Worst drought in 70 years, hottest August ever, the olive oil crop destroyed (and probably everything else too), but meanwhile Europe is pushing for more austerity in a country where the young have a 50% unemployment rate.

The region is headed toward ecological shift into a north African ‘Saharization’, having lost more than 90% of its glaciers by 2009, and now confronted with the loss of major aquifers and decreasing rainfall.

We may be headed for a Mediterranean Spring, where Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece see populist uprisings and widespread rejection of the Austerians. And behind it, just as in North Africa, is drought.

Many parts of the world have passed peak water, but it hasn’t sunk in.

Postmodern thinking has a difficult time making the connection between ‘weather’ — considered as unstable in the short term and stable in the long term —  and what is happening in economic and politics. 

Go search for ‘spanish drought’ or the like. The only stories are about olive oil, or written last spring after the barley crops died. 

But here in the Postnormal era, a growing number of us know that climate is the foundation of wellbeing, economics, and politics. Without sustainable agriculture we will starve, and so climate policy should dominate economic discourse. But it doesn’t: it is last, and globalist dogma about unfettered growth dominates.

So you will continue to read about riots and demonstrations in mediterranean countries, but any discussion about the drought will be buried in the food section in some fluff piece about the rising price of olive oil. The postmodernists are living in an era that is passed, and they don’t even know it.

Apparently qat, the mild narcotic plant, uses a tremendous amount of water, and that — along with other water uses — spells doom for the poorest country in the Arab world, Yemen.

Hugh Macleod and John Vidal, Yemen threatens to chew itself to death over thirst for narcotic qat plant

Most experts predict Sana’a, the fastest-growing capital in the world at 7% a year, will run out of economically viable water supplies by 2017. That is the same year the World Bank says Yemen will cease earning income from its oil, which currently accounts for three-quarters of the state’s revenues.

The cost of water in some suburbs of Sana’a has tripled in the last year, and armed conflicts over water resources around the city are increasing. Shortages in the summer months leave thousands of families with taps run dry, forcing them to spend a third of their meagre incomes on buying water from trucks.

According to Mahmoud Shidiwah, chair of the Yemeni government’s water and environment protection agency, 19 of the country’s 21 main water aquifers are no longer being replenished after a long drought and increasing demand. He says Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, receives under 200 cubic metres a person a year, well below the international water poverty line of 1,000 cubic metres. The water basin in Taiz, one of Yemen’s largest cities, has already collapsed. Neighbouring Amran is close, as is Saada in the north.

The water situation is so serious that the government has considered moving the capital, as well as desalinating seawater on the coast and pumping it 2,000 metres uphill to the capital. A third solution would be to transfer water over the mountains from another basin. Shidiwah says: “We have a very big problem. All options have been found to be unacceptable.”

The best solution, everyone agrees, is to reduce qat growing, which sucks up the largest share of water use. But this is also fraught with social and political problems, says Shidiwah, because in a country where half the population earn less than $2 a day it provides many jobs.

The Texas drought is just the worst on record in recent times. The dendrochronology — tree ring analysis — for the region shows that decade long droughts are not unusual in that region. Paire that with global warming, and…

Richard Parker, As Texas Dries Out, Life Falters and Fades

Generally, droughts in the Southwest are caused by La Niña, the weather pattern involving cooling of waters in the Pacific, which pushes warm, dry air inland, shifting the rains away from Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. In Texas the worst drought, known as the Drought of Record, parched the state from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, with catastrophic consequences for land, livestock and people. Yet that drought was the longest only since rain gauges have been used to keep records — a practice that began in 1895.

In fact, Texas has long been stalked by megadroughts, events that can last 30, even 40 years. The story is told within the trunks of the bald cypress that line the creek and riverbeds of central Texas. Using the science of dendrochronology, researchers from Texas and Arkansas sampled nearly 300 trunk-core samples, creating a record of tree rings stretching back before Columbus landed in the Americas. One tree, still living, was but a sapling in 1426.

The record shows that in the 1700s and early 1800s, before American settlement and even extensive Spanish and Mexican settlement, several dry stretches were longer than the Drought of Record. The driest 10 years were 1716 through 1725, and the worst 20 years were 1697 through 1716. There have been numerous 30- and 40-year droughts. The worst gripped Texas and Mexico for nearly a half-century, from 1450 to 1489.

But the future, sadly, is likely to be worse than the past. “Texas is going to get hotter and drier,” said Malcolm Cleaveland, a professor at the University of Arkansas who led the researchers. Indeed, rainfall modeling shows that rising temperatures and more arid conditions over the last few decades are likely to increase in the 21st century.

According to a paper published in Science in 2007, “Droughts will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades.” Rain will become more rare and it will evaporate more quickly, making the megadroughts of old look like periodic dry spells. And it will be in part thanks to increased carbon emissions, a fact that Texas will have a hard time confronting.

But no one wants to connect the dots, even as they tally up all the cattle being sacrificed early, the wheat being plowed under, and the river drying up. A place like Texas, with persistent drought, is basically uninhabitable, and people will start moving away.

I’ll predict that Texas will fall from 25M people (more or less) to 10M or less in the next 5 years, as the drought destabilizes the economy there.

Buried in a story about economic chaos in Yemen, and the political fall out from that, is perhaps the real root cause: Yemen is running out of water, and fast.

Robert Worth and Laura Kasinoff, Chaos in Yemen Drives Economy to Edge of Ruin

The most fundamental of Yemen’s diverse woes is lack of water. Since the political crisis began in January, the price of water has risen fivefold in some areas, tenfold in others. The drills that pump water from Yemen’s rapidly dwindling underground supplies are falling silent, because the diesel they require has grown so expensive and scarce. The area around Sana is especially arid, and it could become the first capital ever to run out of water, said experts at the World Bank.

Syria and Iraq have had almost a decade of drought, leading to widespread migration and the abandonment of many villages (see here and here), and Yemen’s drought has been a long term problem, as I reported a year ago, long before the political upheaval. This drought extends to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lebanon.

The Nile region, including Egypt and its upstream neighbors, has terrible water issues, which are likely to lead to open conflict.

The fundamental economic issue in the entire middle east and extending to North Africa is a shift toward an increasingly hot and arid climate, and the rapid overuse of water resources.

Meanwhile, we outside the region view the turmoil there as being driven by some renaissance of democratic ideals. The hard reality may settle in after the dust settles on the revolutions and elections and parades and backslapping, when people begin fighting over the little water remaining in the region, and the refugees start heading north to Europe.