The United States of Megadrought a comin'

[downzy]

Not good news for those living on the western areas of North America:

http://qz.com/343515/the-us-is-on-track-for-a-record-breaking-megadrought/

In just a few decades, a huge swath of the US could experience the biggest megadrought that the US has seen in 1,000 years.

New research published on Feb. 12 in the journal Science Advances predicts that this hypothetical could become reality from the Mississippi River to California. It could make the Dust Bowl of the 1930s seem mild by comparison.

No one knows what megadroughts, which can last from 30-50 years, look like. So researchers from NASA and Columbia and Cornell Universities went back 1,000 years to peer confidently into our drier future.

“If you want to study drought variability in the past, trees are the records to do it with,” lead author Benjamin I. Cook, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told Quartz. Cook used a network of 835 tree ring chronologies collected throughout much of North America. “The drought signal in these trees is huge,” he said. The record provided a robust, unbroken dryness gauge back to 1000 AD.

Cook’s team was particularly interested in what’s called the “Medieval Warm Period,” which spanned from the 9th to the 13th century. Like most climate change stories, it created winners and losers depending on where you lived. It thawed the north, allowing Leif Erikson and his fellow vikings to colonize Newfoundland in Canada. In the west, it meant drought that “far exceeded the severity, duration, and extent of subsequent droughts,” which may have lead to the collapse of the Pueblo Indian civilization.

This was all before humanity started power-blasting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Cook told Quartz that the Medieval warming provided a natural baseline, allowing him to model human-instigated megadroughts in the future.

To do this, his team used a popular drought index to connect tree records with 17 different climate models (to be sure). They used historical measurements taken every year since 1850 to confirm the models could match reality (to be extra sure). They also used the models to create two different estimates of soil moisture (to be extra extra sure). One estimate tracks the topsoil and the other measures moisture a few feet deep.

They then hitched the three drought trackers to two greenhouse gas emissions scenarios: one that assumes we do nothing, and the other imagines that we curtail emissions like our lives depended on it. From these pieces, they could generate megadrought predictions for the last half of the 21st century.

The possible future that emerged was sobering.

“Our results show it’s very likely, if we continue on our current trajectory of greenhouse gas emission and warming, that regions in the west will be drier at the end of the 21st century than the driest centuries during the Medieval era,” Cook told Quartz.

But just how likely is very likely? The study puts the chances of a megadrought in the central plains and southwest sometime between 2050-2099 at above 80%. That’s compared with just a 5-10% risk from 1950-2000. Even the milder emissions scenario predicts drying comparable to a Medieval-style megadrought in many locations. “This really represents a fundamental shift in the climate in western North America forced by these greenhouse gases—it’s a shift towards a much drier baseline than anything that anyone alive today has experienced,” said Cook.

“I believe that the results are quite robust,” said James Famiglietti, senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and professor at the University of California at Irvine, who was not involved in the research. “My real concerns are for the implications of the results, which are staggering,” he told Quartz by email.

When asked how a megadrought, if it started today, would affect in the West, Famiglietti said that public water, aquifers, agriculture, rangelands, wildlife and forests would all be at risk. He added: “In California, we’re already in deep trouble. Imagine what the water situation will look like in 2075? Depleted groundwater, decimated agriculture, irreparable damage to ecological habitat. Think apocalypse.”

He’s recently written about the water crisis in California, where he imagined the state as a “disaster movie waiting to happen.” After reading the new study, he told Quartz that it “presents a real doomsday scenario and a situation that is far worse than anything that I had been thinking about.”

But the hazards of a megadrought go even deeper than the water we use for drinking and growing food. Without water, there would be no power to farm or transport drinking water or light our houses or fuel our cars. Water, climate change and energy are absolutely intertwined, according to Vincent Tidwell, a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. And he told Quartz that there’s really no part of the energy system that is immune to drought.

Its effects on hydropower are pretty obvious, but water is also heavily used from the drilling well all the way to the power plant. Past droughts have slowed oil and gas recovery and kept oil and coal from being barged up and down Mississippi River. Sometimes drought can even keep new power plants from being built.

Many power companies, especially those burned by drought in the past, have worked out deals in advance to secure water when supplies are tight, said Tidwell. But none of those companies have operated through a megadrought that lasts for decades. And there’s no plan for that. “If things get really, really tight, who knows what might happen,” he said.

But many of the energy providers that he works with, such as the Western Energy Coordinating Council, are starting to plan for the worst. Tidwell even sees good coming out of the looming specter of a megadrought.

“We need to be thinking about intensifying drought and bringing it into our planning, but I think there are also a lot of opportunities, but it’s going to take more cooperation and more coordination to face the uncertainty of the future,” he told Quartz. “We can’t continue the status quo.”

[Dazey]

All lies! Liberal propaganda! It snowed last week so it's all bollocks or something.

[AxlisOld]

I live in the NW, by a river. I don't care.

[downzy]

I live in the NW, by a river. I don't care.

That's the spirit!

[OmarBradley]

I live in the NW, by a river. I don't care.

That's the spirit!

And I live on the east coast. Not my problem.

It's the American way!

In fact, those western bastards probably deserve it. East coast FTW

Edited February 13, 2015 by OmarBradley

[Dazey]

Gotta say that I care in theory but I need to buy a new couch and I've just seen an amazing leather armchair so I'm probably not that committed to the cause if I'm honest.

[Facekicker]

It rains in Ireland non-stop. I await the US invasion to bring democracy to Ireland

[downzy]

In some ways I think living in Southern Ontario is probably one of the best places to live in North America from a weather/disaster perspective. We're surrounded by massive bodies of fresh water, we don't experience hurricanes, floods, tornados (well, once in a blue moon), tsunamis. We do get earthquakes, but they're tiny, akin to when a fat person walks into room. There are minor moments of excessive weather (today it was -26 degrees Celsius), but for the most part the climate is moderate.

The warmer climates of California and Florida are nice to visit, but there's no way I'd want to be there when a hurricane or earthquake tears apart both states. Much of the southern parts of the U.S. seem to be suffering from severe droughts, while many parts of the north and central plains deal with flooding. And it looks like the upper east coast will be dealing with more hurricanes and severe storms as the oceans warm up.

[classicrawker]

I may be dead and buried before this becomes a reality but my children and their children are pretty much screwed then.

[bran]

im pretty sure we will be alright.

[AxlisOld]

No we fuckin won't bran. Every weather related disaster ever speculated has come true.

[gunsguy]

In some ways I think living in Southern Ontario is probably one of the best places to live in North America from a weather/disaster perspective. We're surrounded by massive bodies of fresh water, we don't experience hurricanes, floods, tornados (well, once in a blue moon), tsunamis. We do get earthquakes, but they're tiny, akin to when a fat person walks into room. There are minor moments of excessive weather (today it was -26 degrees Celsius), but for the most part the climate is moderate.

The warmer climates of California and Florida are nice to visit, but there's no way I'd want to be there when a hurricane or earthquake tears apart both states. Much of the southern parts of the U.S. seem to be suffering from severe droughts, while many parts of the north and central plains deal with flooding. And it looks like the upper east coast will be dealing with more hurricanes and severe storms as the oceans warm up.

You just said the US will be fucked in the OP, when and if that happens you will be living in the USA not Southern Ontario. Why? You think they are going to not invade us for our water? LOL

Anyway earth has cycles, this may or may not be true or if it is it is just another cycle

[downzy]

In some ways I think living in Southern Ontario is probably one of the best places to live in North America from a weather/disaster perspective. We're surrounded by massive bodies of fresh water, we don't experience hurricanes, floods, tornados (well, once in a blue moon), tsunamis. We do get earthquakes, but they're tiny, akin to when a fat person walks into room. There are minor moments of excessive weather (today it was -26 degrees Celsius), but for the most part the climate is moderate.

The warmer climates of California and Florida are nice to visit, but there's no way I'd want to be there when a hurricane or earthquake tears apart both states. Much of the southern parts of the U.S. seem to be suffering from severe droughts, while many parts of the north and central plains deal with flooding. And it looks like the upper east coast will be dealing with more hurricanes and severe storms as the oceans warm up.

You just said the US will be fucked in the OP, when and if that happens you will be living in the USA not Southern Ontario. Why? You think they are going to not invade us for our water? LOL

Anyway earth has cycles, this may or may not be true or if it is it is just another cycle

Well, not sure if they need to invade us for the water in the Great Lakes. Pretty sure they have as much lakeside access as we do

[bran]

it will be canadian bacon all over again.

[gunsguy]

In some ways I think living in Southern Ontario is probably one of the best places to live in North America from a weather/disaster perspective. We're surrounded by massive bodies of fresh water, we don't experience hurricanes, floods, tornados (well, once in a blue moon), tsunamis. We do get earthquakes, but they're tiny, akin to when a fat person walks into room. There are minor moments of excessive weather (today it was -26 degrees Celsius), but for the most part the climate is moderate.

The warmer climates of California and Florida are nice to visit, but there's no way I'd want to be there when a hurricane or earthquake tears apart both states. Much of the southern parts of the U.S. seem to be suffering from severe droughts, while many parts of the north and central plains deal with flooding. And it looks like the upper east coast will be dealing with more hurricanes and severe storms as the oceans warm up.

You just said the US will be fucked in the OP, when and if that happens you will be living in the USA not Southern Ontario. Why? You think they are going to not invade us for our water? LOL

Anyway earth has cycles, this may or may not be true or if it is it is just another cycle

Well, not sure if they need to invade us for the water in the Great Lakes. Pretty sure they have as much lakeside access as we do

I mean the clean lakes and water further north lol