Underpaid Genius

Cornelia Dean reviews A Great Aridness by William deBuys and Bird On Fire by Andrew Ross, two works looking at Southwestern drought:

Cornelia Dean via NYTimes.com

Both authors cite the work of Jonathan Overpeck, a geologist and a director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona, whose tracking of simultaneously increasing temperatures and decreasing rainfall leads him to conclude that a new era of drought is dawning in many regions. He is not alone. The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies had already predicted that extreme droughts would be an every-other-year phenomenon in the United States by the middle of this century.

And of course, the American Southwest is not the only region experiencing drought apparently tied to climate change. According to the journal Science, of the 12 driest winters the Mediterranean has experienced since 1902, 10 have occurred in the last 20 years. Researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say climate change can explain half of the added dryness.

“The coming droughts ought to be a major driver — if not the major driver — of climate policies,” Joseph Romm wrote in a recent issue of the journal Nature. Dr. Romm, a physicist who edits the blog Climate Progress, added, “Raising public awareness of, and scientific focus on, the likelihood of severe effects of drought is the first step to prompting action.”

People who read these books will understand that message.

One step, Dr. Ross writes, would be to begin rectifying the environmental inequality that already consigns the poor to bad air, polluted water and general environmental degradation.

“Can the well-provisioned respond in kind to the environmentalist claims of the poor?” he asks. If an era of real water scarcity dawns, as many scientists now predict it inevitably will, the ability of states and localities to allocate supplies fairly will be a telling test. If they fail that test, Dr. Ross writes, they face a future of “eco-apartheid.”

Dr. deBuys puts it somewhat differently. History teaches that people have difficulty adapting to prolonged, extreme drought, he writes. Faced with it, they typically abandon efforts to cope and simply abandon their homes. That is why we call dry places deserts — they are deserted.

Is that tactic likely for today’s Southwest? No. But, he writes, any answers to the water challenge will require “strong social will and collective commitment.”

At the moment, though, the region’s politics tend to embrace the idea that collective action of any kind is inherently suspicious or even evil; government is the problem, never the solution; and regulation is the bane of economic growth.

These ideas are not in accord with Dr. deBuys’s prescription, which is to “get on with what we should have been doing all along, including limiting greenhouse gases.”

There is no silver bullet, he writes. “There is only the age-old duty to extend kindness to other beings, to work together and with discipline on common challenges.”

I disagree with deBuys: The American southwest will be deserted, because people cannot easily live in climates without abundant water. Given the option to move away — which we have in the US today — people will migrate.

I expect a serious flight of people from the southwest this year. For example, the 500M trees that died in Texas last year — around 10% of all the state’s trees — will likely lead to serious brush fires. That, coupled with another year of record drought could lead millions of people to migrate north, back to the heartland: Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan.

In northern Mexico, the 2011 drought has already led to the migration of over 2.5M people.

I am predicting 20M Americans will eventually leave the southwest, moving north and east, over the next few years.

I also predict the Water Wars will be the most divisive issue confronting us in the next decades, and they will rage worldwide. We are not prepared for 100 million ecological refugees disregarding borders in order to get to water.

Mongolia is currently enduring a heatwave, with temperatures over the past 2 months hovering around the high 30s Celsius. Combine this with a below average rainfall, resulting in little grass growth and it is beginning to look like a harsh autumn and winter ahead which will be a threat to herders and their animals.

[…]

The dzud conditions [snow is too deep for animals to get down to the covered vegetation] of the last few years have exacerbated this moth infestation, which is destroying large tracks of the natural pine and larch forests. The dead trees are tinder dry and fuel the fires which are sweeping through them.

Vegetable crops are wilting and dying, the parched earth hard and cracked and many people have lost their harvest and therefore the small but vital income generated from the sale of excess produce.

From a promising early start to the summer when spring rains where almost back to normal after 4 years of below average rainfall, it looks like another emergency relief situation could be looming for the coming winter.

Wildfires are burning out of control, and it has reached 41º C [105.8º F] in some locales, 20º C above normal.

Alex Prud’homme starts out strong, telling the scray truth about the drought of 2011, but then he peters out into a half-hearted, techno-optimist plea for water prudence in a world of unyeilding water scarcity.

Here’s the hard truth:

Alex Prud’Homme via

Climatologists call drought a “creeping disaster” because its effects are not felt at once. Others compare drought to a python, which slowly and inexorably squeezes its prey to death.

The great aridification of 2011 began last fall; now temperatures in many states have spiked to more than 100 degrees for days at a stretch. A high pressure system has stalled over the middle of the country, blocking cool air from the north. Texas and New Mexico are drier than in any year on record.

The deadly heat led to 138 deaths last year, more than hurricanes, tornadoes or floods, and it turns brush to tinder that is vulnerable to lightning strikes and human carelessness. Already this year, some 40,000 wildfires have torched over 5.8 million acres nationwide — and the deep heat of August is likely to make conditions worse before they get better.

Climatologists disagree about what caused this remarkable dry-out. But there is little disagreement about the severity of the drought — or its long-term implications. When I asked Richard Seagar, who analyzed historical records and climate model projections for the Southwest for the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, if a perpetual drought was possible there, he replied: “You can’t really call it a drought because that implies a temporary change. The models show a progressive aridification. You don’t say, ‘The Sahara is in drought.’ It’s a desert. If the models are right, then the Southwest will face a permanent drying out.”

Richard Seagar, the climatologist, says this aridification is permanent, but Prud’homme doesn’t tell us what that means. How much water will there be in 5 years in West Texas, Northern Florida, Las Vegas, or downtown LA? The answer — not presented in the article — is: not much. Much of that region is likely to become The Great American Desert, with significantly less rainfall than ever seen previously.

This means the end of lawns and golf courses, the termination of all water use that makes the arid south end of the country feel like the temperate north. It means the eventual departure of most of the people living there, now that the great aquifers have been pumped dry, and the rains aren’t coming back.

The Colorado no longer reaches the Sea of Cortez, but comes to a dusty end in northern Mexico, all of its water diverted to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and cattle ranches.

But Prud’homme doesn’t let the other foot drop. He goes preachy, suggesting we need to install better water meters so we can become more water conscious, or figure out how to desalinate water:

Singapore provides a noteworthy model: no country uses water more sparingly. In the 1950s, it faced water rationing, but it began to build a world-class water system in the 1960s. Now 40 percent of its water comes from Malaysia, while a remarkable 25 to 30 percent is provided by desalination and the recycling of wastewater; the rest is drawn from sources that include large-scale rainwater collection. Demand is curbed by high water taxes and efficient technologies, and Singaporeans are constantly exhorted to conserve every drop. Most important, the nation’s water is managed by a sophisticated, well-financed, politically autonomous water authority. As a result, Singapore’s per-capita water use fell to 154 liters, about 41 gallons, a day in 2011, from 165 liters, about 44 gallons, in 2003.

America is a much larger and more complex nation. But Singapore’s example suggests we could do a far better job of educating our citizens about conservation. And we could take other basic steps: install smart meters to find out how much water we use, and identify leaks (which drain off more than 1 trillion gallons a year); use tiered water pricing to encourage efficiency; promote rainwater harvesting and wastewater recycling on a large scale. And like Singapore, we could streamline our Byzantine water governance system and create a new federal water office — a water czar or an interagency national water board — to manage the nation’s supply in a holistic way.

No question this will be an expensive, politically cumbersome effort. But as reports from New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Georgia and Florida make plain, business as usual is not a real option. The python of drought is already wrapped tightly around us, and in weeks — and years — to come it will squeeze us dangerously dry.

The truth is much more stark. Water is too heavy to pump any great distance, unlike oil, so desalination is only an option for regions on the ocean, like LA, not Las Vegas or Phoenix.

And the likely outcome is that great numbers of people will need to relocate, to move to where there is ample water.

If we are sensible we would be anticipating this now, and making sensible policy decisions to incent people to do so. We might soon be dismantling the sprawl of the southwest, taking the glass and iron from the buildings, and trucking it north to New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Michigan, places where projections show sufficient water and warmer temperatures in the coming decades, and rebuilding the hollowed urban centers there with scrap hauled back from the Southwest.

But the natural tendency is to think that things will blow over, next year’s weather will be like last years.

But we are on the other side of a turning point, and the Earth we have now, as Bill McKibben has said, is not the Earth we had 20 years ago. And that Earth isn’t going to return, even if we do install better water meters, or recycle the dish water into the toilets. We are over the threshold into a whole new climate, like it or not, and we better start acting like it.