In recent days and weeks, we’ve been seeing similar-sounding headlines out of California, such as this: Sacramento breaks 130-year old for low rainfall And this: LA is on track to set dry-weather record Indeed, as my fellow Discover blogger Tom Yulsman noted last month: We’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for the official year-end precipitation…Continue Reading…
Pretty much anything you can think of is being worsened by global warming. We know this because there are studies about such things that get well reported in the media. That’s how I know that climate change is affecting football, chocolate, wine, allergies, food prices, summer, wildfires, storms, and drought. (Obviously, this is not a…Continue Reading…
In a New York Times op-ed, Charles Fishman writes: We’re in the worst drought in the United States since the 1950s, and we’re wasting it. Though the drought has devastated corn crops and disrupted commerce on the Mississippi River, it also represents an opportunity to tackle long-ignored water problems and to reimagine how we manage,…Continue Reading…
If you had time to read only one scholarly paper on drought, I’d suggest this one (published in 2007) by Cook et al. It’s a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary overview that amply supports this assertion made in the first sentence of the abstract: Severe drought is the greatest recurring natural disaster to strike North America. The Cook…Continue Reading…
One of the unfortunate consequences of the hyperbolic, circumscribed climate change discourse (It’s all hoax, No it’s not!) is that we don’t pay enough attention to the climate change that did happen in prehistory, specifically the mega-droughts that combined with other factors to cripple ancient empires. These are complicated stories that are still being puzzled…Continue Reading…
In north Texas, a resident blanches at the idea of major water restrictions kicking in because of the area’s drought: In Garland, it’s a major concern for resident Charlotte Piercy, who has lived in her neighborhood for 56 years. Piercy already hates her grass looking brown because of the Winter, but she fears, come the…Continue Reading…
And they have a message: Researchers say they have found new evidence of prolonged drought in parts of the West, suggesting megadroughts are not the rarity Westerners would like them to be. Of course, there is already ample evidence for Westerners not to think this, but c’mon, who remembers what they had for dinner on Tuesday,…Continue Reading…
Drought by area impacted is worst ever–though majority of US still drought free From the Dept of Silver Linings
Just for kicks, here’s my revisions to the opening paragraph in this Climate Progress post: Another week, another New York Times article Joe Romm post on extreme weather that fails to stretches climate science to simplistically connect the dots to global warming for the public. The NYT Romm blew the Arizona wildfire story. They He blew the Dust…Continue Reading…
This nuanced statement by Tom Kenworthy, a former reporter, was spot on until the very end (my emphasis): The reasons that the desert Southwest is having another extreme fire season are complex. They include decades of poor forestry and livestock grazing practices, misguided federal firefighting efforts that have prevented low-intensity fires in Ponderosa pine forests…Continue Reading…