Dried & Prejudiced

Despite the fact that the famed Oglala Aquifer is virtually bone dry in its southern reaches, cracked and parched farmland in southern Kansas and northern Texas is still selling well in anticipation of the end of the current drought cycle. It’s also known as the High Plains Aquifer, a once massive body of water – the size of one of the Great Lakes – that stretches from the Dakotas to north Texas. Sellers cannot coax crops from this arid earth, and federally subsidized “farm insurance” forces farmers to plant seeds they know will never germinate in the water-starved dirt in order to get big fat checks from the government for crops that will never grow in this increasingly desertified area. Rain is insufficient, streams have run dry, temperatures are rising and the aquifer is tapped out.

I mean, it is cyclical, right? Everything is, I guess, but for those who deny that man caused the bulk of the global warming – I have hammered those statistics so often, they are not worth repeating – there is hope that “normal” weather patterns will repeat themselves. Hey, they exclaim, we even survived the Depression era Dust Bowl and returned to productive farming.

If you remotely believe in analyzing the numbers and trend lines, creating unbelievably complex computer simulations and relying on major universities with the best minds in earth sciences in the world, if you are finally able to look at the hard numbers of what has actually already happened as predicted by these experts rather consistently, buying farmland in south Kansas or north Texas is probably a very bad use of your money. In fact, farming in the entire Midwest grain belt and all of the Southwest for the foreseeable future is downright scary. A bit scary in the immediate future, quite frightening soon thereafter, and by 2050, absolutely terrifying.

“The U.S. is facing the worst drought in 1,000 years, ‘driven primarily’ by man-made climate change… By the end of this century, researchers are predicting years-long dry spells exacerbated by higher temperatures, creating conditions worse than so-called megadroughts that have been linked to the decline of American Indian cultures in the U.S. Southwest, according to an article published [February 12^th] in the journal Science Advances.

“The conclusion is further evidence that human activity is having profound, harmful and long-lasting impacts on the planet, and will continue to threaten the environment even if carbon emissions are significantly curtailed… ‘The bad news is, these past megadroughts -- and we don’t use ‘mega-’ lightly -- when we compare the characteristics of those to the projections from future models, the future’s worse,’ said Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist at Columbia University in New York and one of the authors of the report.’ Bloomberg.com, February 12^th.

“NASA is now predicting [that the] ‘megadrought’ as early as 2050 that might last 30 or more years and transform a broad swath of the United States into an arid Dust Bowl. If greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase along current trajectories, say NASA researchers, there is a staggering 80 percent likelihood of the Southwest and Central Plains experiencing a decades-long megadrought worse than any that has occurred in the past 1,000 years.” Washington Post, February 19^th.

The earth once maintained massive forests where today deserts are all that is left. All that lovely oil under Middle Eastern desert is the accumulation of ancient carbon-based life, compressed for millennia. The shift in land values in these farming mainstays has clearly begun, and our ability to churn out massive levels of food crops will plummet accordingly, just as demand for food in a Malthusian-demographic explosion places increasing demand on the entire global food chain. It won’t be short drought, I venture to predict with confidence.

Native American populations throughout the Americas have moved, faded in and out, with changes in water patterns, but nothing in recent history can compare to the expected megadrought we seem to have generated for ourselves. “California’s drought is entering its fourth year, with snowpack levels about one-quarter of historical averages. San Francisco went without rain in January for the first time in 165 years. The drought is affecting more than 64 million people in the Southwest and Southern Plains, according to NASA data cited in the study.

“Droughts toward the end of this century are unlikely to force mass migrations, but food shortages and escalating energy prices are legitimate concerns, said Amir AghaKouchak, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of California at Irvine. Rising temperatures already are a significant risk to humans without adding in reduced rainfall, he said.

“‘Even if droughts don’t increase, because of this increase in temperature you have more and more concurrent extremes,’ he said in an interview. ‘If you have two extremes happening at the same time, you’ll have this compound impact. It makes a big, big difference.’” Bloomberg.com.

In a bitter twist of irony, the deeply-religious, Tea Party climate-change deniers have powerful roots in most of the Midwest grain best and much of the Southwest. They simply cannot believe that a Christian God who promised no more global-scale environmental disasters after the Great Flood and instructed man to use earth’s bounty without concern would leave them high and dry.

They have championed taking the reins off of environmental regulations – most of which are woefully inadequate anyway – to foster unregulated growth to solve our economic malaise. They have supported the fracking movement which has pushed the United States back up the petroleum production ladder, and they have clamored for government to cut social support to those in need. And in the end, they will have seriously contributed to the demise of their own livelihoods, for them and the generations to follow, and to becoming those in dire need of those social programs designed to help those in need.

Since we are obviously going to have that drought, what can we actually do to grab and save water? More research and on drought-resistant crops, but that might mean accepting GMO as a way of life. We need to be building a whole lot more coastal desalinization plants, stop the massive leaks of old (pre-1930s) urban pipes, use technology to monitor water at every stage from source to waste and use that data (via the “Internet of things”) to increase efficiencies, perhaps use drones to observe agricultural water use, redesign irrigation systems to put water precisely and only where it is needed, have consumers know exactly what their water usage patterns are and encourage them to implement savings, seed water entrepreneurs to create new solutions and… consider messing further with mother nature by redirecting the weather itself.

“Ever since Beijing used cloud seeding techniques to prevent rainfall over the city during the 2008 Summer Olympics, people have been fascinated by the idea of “weather modification.” China, in fact, was the first nation to create a Weather Modification Bureau.  Currently,24 countries practice some form of weather modification, including the United States, which has looked into ways to minimize the impact of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico.

“Based on that initial work, Bill Gates and Richard Branson have championed new geoengineering techniques that go well beyond changes to the local weather and start to impact the earth’s climate. Researchers from Harvard and Stanford have already proposedgeoengineering concepts for the earth’s atmosphere. Some of the ideas for dealing with droughts, admittedly, sound like something out of a science fiction movie – flooding Death Valley with seawater via a canal from the Pacific Ocean or wrapping Greenland with blanketsto capture freshwater ice. Yet, there are some examples, such as China’s massive ‘grand canals,’  that hint at how massive changes to the Earth may be the ultimate Hail Mary pass to bring water to parched regions.” The Post.

So think our Congress is going to admit there is a problem and deal with it? Yeah… and I’m the Easter Bunny. Exactly how bad do things have to get in order to move our elected representatives to deal with this slow but definite death spiral? Does it matter that virtually every prediction on the climate change time-line to date was wrong? That the bad stuff happened much sooner and much faster than predicted?

I’m Peter Dekom, and it does seem as if we are living in a country where the only lessons we ever really understand are those learned the hard way… often the hardest way possible.