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Image courtesy: Australia's Bureau of Meteorology/Public Domain
It's official, 2012 was a record year for heat in the US, and 2013 is already turning out to be historic for Australia, a country that is used to extreme heat, but nothing quite like what they're getting now. A "dome of heat" has settled over the country and caused record-breaking temperatures; so much so that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology actually had to add a new color to its weather maps to show the hottest parts of the country (it's purple, as you can see above). This extends the range up to 54 degrees celsius (129.2 fahrenheit)! This is significantly above the all-time record temperature of 50.7 degrees celsius reached on January 2, 1960 at Oodnadatta Airport in South Australia. On a personal level, I don't handle heat very well; and, these types of temperatures would kill me - literally.
Image courtesy: Australia's Bureau of Meteorology/Public Domain
This second map is the forecast for January 17th, 2013. As you can see, the purple spot is predicted to go away, but the temperatures are still extremely elevated (remember these are celsius degrees, so Fahrenheit, the darker spots are forecast to get around 115F).
The Sydney Morning Herald describes the records that have been broken so far and those that could fall:And the country has set a new national average maximum of 40.33 degrees on Monday, beating the previous record - set on December 21, 1972 - by a "sizeable margin" of 0.16 degrees, Dr Jones said, adding that the figures are preliminary.
"Today is actually shaping up to be hotter - and it could be a record by a similar margin," he said.
Another record to be smashed on Monday was Australia's mean temperature. The country averaged 32.23, easily eclipsing the previous record - set on December 21, 1972 - of 31.86 degrees. Just 0.13 degrees separated the previous four highest mean temperatures, underscoring how far above average the day was.
The scorching temperatures could last into the weekend and beyond, Dr Jones said, potentially breaking the country's all-time high of 50.7 degrees.
It's not clear when the "dome of heat" will subside, but this could be a preview of the kind of extreme weather events that climate change could bring us with increasing frequency.
The round hay bales used on larger farms. Photo courtesy: Flickr/CC BY 2.0
Economics 101 says that, all else being equal, when the supply of something goes down, the price should go up. That's exactly what has been happening with hay in drought and wildfire-afflicted areas of the United States. In fact, many aren't ready to fork out the extra cash, or they simply can't locate a seller, because there's been a big resurgence of hay bale thefts. "Sheriffs in rural counties in Colorado, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Kansas say the spike in hay thefts is part of a broader rise in agricultural crime," writes the New York Times. It's not the most heinous crime out there by a long shot, but it affects the lives of many farmers and it's a symptom of the kind of extreme weather we've been experiencing. And on a warming planet, we should expect more...
The results of haying season. Photo courtesy: Flickr/CC BY 2.0
California’s farmers have grappled recently with growing thefts of grapes, beehives and avocados, and sheriffs say high prices of scrap metal have made agricultural machinery — whether it works or not — an appealing target. Dubious online merchants are selling feed to farmers but never delivering. On the range, wire fences are being clipped to allow interloping herds to poach grazing land.
Most thieves make off with less than a ton of hay — about $200 to $300 worth, depending on the quality. But on Labor Day in Wellington, Colo., thieves hot-wired a front-end loader and stole enough hay from Conrad T. Swanson’s ranch to fill the flatbed trailer of a semi. (source)
In some areas it's serious enough that a sheriff in Tillman County, Okla., put a GPS-tracking device in a bale in a field particularly prone to thefts. The trick actually worked and the thieves were caught red-handed, but it's not exactly practical to track all hay bales with GPS, so until then, farmers will have to hope for a more cooperative weather.
Photo courtesy: USDAgov
The following article was written by Janet Larsen, Director of Research for the Earth Policy Institute.
When most people hear the term “dust bowl,” they think of the American heartland in the 1930s, when a homesteading wheat bonanza led to the plowing up of the Great Plains’ native grassland, culminating in the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history.
Despite warnings from researchers and some farmers, history repeated itself in the Soviet Virgin Lands Project in the 1950s to early 1960s. Some 100 million acres (40 million hectares) of grassland were plowed under in Russia, Kazakhstan, and western Siberia during Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s push to produce ever more food from the land. When drought hit, the topsoil started to blow away. By 1965, nearly half the newly-planted area was degraded by wind erosion. Yields plummeted. Ultimately farmers staged a retreat, abandoning much of that land.
Unfortunately, dust bowls are not just relics of the past. Today two new dust bowls are forming: one in northern China and southern Mongolia and the other in Africa south of the Sahara. Whereas the dust bowls in the United States and the Soviet Union were the result of overplowing, the main culprit in Asia and Africa is overgrazing. Although arid or semiarid grasslands are typically better suited for grazing livestock than for farming, once they are overstocked their protective grass covering deteriorates and they face erosion all the same.
Forty percent of China’s land area is grassland. Following agricultural reforms that began in the late 1970s, in which collectively-owned livestock were transferred to household ownership, China’s cattle herds grew from 52 million in 1980 to nearly 105 million in 2000, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Meanwhile, China’s population of sheep and goats ballooned from close to 180 million to 280 million. Such a high concentration of grazing animals has put unsustainable pressure on the land. For comparison, the United States — a country with comparable grazing capacity — hosts a similar number of cattle but only 9 million sheep and goats.
The fastest growth in China’s livestock occurred with goats; starting in the mid-1980s, the herd size doubled in just 10 years. This is particularly troubling because a fast expansion of goat populations relative to cattle can indicate grassland deterioration. Goats are hardy, able to survive where few other grazers can. They can make efficient use of remaining greenery on nearly barren landscapes. Yet large numbers of goats often portend further environmental degradation because as the animals remove existing vegetation, they leave soils vulnerable to erosion from wind or rain.
Noting that an extraordinary 90 percent of China’s grasslands are degraded, the Chinese government has embarked on restoration programs, including re-vegetation, grazing bans, and livestock confinement. The government also has moved nomadic herders off the land or limited their movement under the guise of environmental protection. Evidence from the field, however, reveals that disrupting traditional grazing patterns can exacerbate land degradation and leave pastoralists more vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather.
FAO data indicate that since 2000, China’s cattle numbers have shrunk by 20 million, and the growth in sheep and goat herds appears to have stalled. Whether this can be attributed to policies aimed at reducing herd size or the relocation of herders is unclear.
Meanwhile, much damage has been done, and China’s dust bowl rages on. More than a quarter of China’s land area is covered by desert, and each year spreading sands claim additional territory. Expanding deserts in the arid northwest are merging. Since 1950, more than 24,000 Chinese villages have been abandoned or are seriously in danger of succumbing to traveling dunes, with some 35 million people directly affected.
The effects reach far beyond the desert margins. Spring is the dust storm season. The snow melts and the wind picks up, transporting dust and sand particles from northern China and Mongolia as far as Beijing and on to Korea and Japan, sometimes even crossing the Pacific to cloud parts of North America. The China Meteorological Administration reports that a single severe dust storm in 2006 dumped 330,000 tons of dust from the west onto Beijing: a stunning 44 pounds for each of the city’s residents. In 2007, a dust storm originating in China’s spreading Taklimakan Desert circled the globe in just under two weeks.
Desert scholar Wang Tao notes that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, China experienced 87 dust storms. Records of very strong dust storms (in which visibility is reduced below 200 meters) show an increase over recent decades, from 5 in the 1950s to 13 in the 1970s, 23 in the 1990s, and 21 between 2000 and 2009. (See data.)
The Korean Ministry of the Environment notes a similar rise in dust storms arriving from China and Mongolia, with talk of a lengthening and strengthening “yellow dust season” in South Korea. Dust events clouded 23 days in the 1970s, 39 days in the 1980s, 77 days in the 1990s, and 118 days from 2000 to 2011.
As bad as Asia’s dust storms are, the largest source of dust in the atmosphere on a global scale is Africa. Dust has long traveled out of Africa’s deserts and drylands, which make up two thirds of the continent’s land area; in fact, dust blowing out of Chad’s Bodélé Depression is thought to help fertilize the lush Amazon rainforest. Nearly 75 percent of Africa’s drylands are degraded. With land suffering the double whammy of drought and overuse, dust carried out of West Africa has increased over the last 40 years. Studies suggest that the larger influx of African dust may even be teaming up with rising ocean temperatures to damage Caribbean coral reefs.
In the Sahelian zone south of the Sahara the squeeze is on, with fast-growing populations trying to eke out a living by farming or grazing herds on ever less productive land. Desertification is particularly acute in Burkina Faso, Chad, and Niger, as well as in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, where an estimated 868,000 acres are lost to desert each year. Conflicts over land between herders (largely Muslim) and farmers (largely Christian) are legion, with both groups exacerbating erosion. Nigerian pastoralists, largely in the country’s north, have dramatically expanded their herds, putting additional pressure on soils already vulnerable because of erratic rainfall. In 1990, Nigeria had 14 million cattle, 12 million sheep, and 23 million goats. By 2010, cattle populations had climbed just slightly to 17 million, but the number of sheep tripled to 36 million, and goats jumped to 56 million.
Both Africa and China have launched ambitious initiatives to halt the spread of deserts with Great Green Walls of trees. Political leaders — including former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo (an early champion of the African Wall) and Abdoulaye Wade, former President of Senegal — tend to favor such large symbolic projects. Indeed in the throes of the U.S. Dust Bowl, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was similarly taken with the idea of a giant shelterbelt. But as happened in the United States, desert containment plans in the Sahel and China have broadened in scope beyond basic tree belts to encompass more holistic land management and poverty alleviation activities. The limited success at holding back the sands in China thus far, where since the early 1980s an estimated 40 billion trees have been planted (although far fewer have survived), confirms that stopping desertification involves much more than planting trees.
Climate change is complicating the matter even further. Large parts of the planet are trending toward dryness, with a marked increase in aridity since the 1970s, when global temperatures started to climb. As the Earth heats up further, droughts are projected to become even more pronounced. A rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to prevent runaway global warming, along with a slowdown in the growth of both human and livestock populations to reduce pressure on the land, are what it will take to increase our chances of leaving dust bowls to history.
Photo courtesy: NASA (Public Domain)
If Corn Flakes is your breakfast cereal of choice - you may want to learn to embrace oatmeal or bran flakes or.... In fact, anything and everything that uses corn in any way, shape or form will rocket in price.
Some of the more common uses of corn are:
* Food products -- Cereals, snack foods, salad dressings, soft drink sweeteners, chewing gum, peanut butter, hominy grits, taco shells and other flour products, specialty corn including white corn, blue corn and popcorn .
* Animal feeds -- Distiller's dried grain, gluten feed and meal, high-oil feed corn for cattle, swine, poultry and fish (expect a rise in the price of meat).
* Industrial products -- Soaps, paints, corks, linoleum, polish, adhesives, rubber substitutes, wallboard, dry-cell batteries, textile finishings, cosmetic powders, candles, dyes, pharmaceuticals, lubricants, insulation, wallpaper and other starch products.
* Fermentation products and byproducts -- industrial alcohols, fuel ethanol, recyclable plastics, industrial enzymes, fuel octane enhancers, fuel oxygenates and solvents.
Aaaggh! The situation is looking rather grim, price wise. However, the following images show an even more disturbing picture.
While in 2011 the Mississippi river reached historic levels and rose out of its banks, this year the story is completely different because of the extended drought that has hit the US. It's so bad that it can even be seen from space, as NASA shows us.
The image above (taken August 8, 2012) shows the effects of the drought, and the one below (taken August 14, 2011) is the comparison pic of "before" at a time when the river's level was much higher. The best way to see it is to go to NASA's site and click on the "image comparison" button that shows you how the two images overlap. Well worth the look. This allows you to really see the difference in the level of the Mississippi river and in the color of the fields that surround it.
Photo courtesy: NASA (Public Domain)
"As of August 17, 2012, river gauges in the Memphis region recorded levels at -2.4 to -8.3 feet (below historic normal stage). At the time of the August 2011 image, the river stage was 11.7 feet. (In May 2011, the river peaked at 56.6 feet in the same location.)"
The low water levels followed record-setting temperatures and dry weather. By the end of July, 63% of the contiguous United States was in drought, affecting both crops and water supplies.
Photo courtesy: Wikipedia
Don't let this gorgeous photo of the City Sign and all the breathtaking wildflowers deceive you. Needles, CA is not for the faint of the heart or the heat intolerant. Needles is located in the Mojave Desert where temperatures on valley floors can soar above 120° F (49° C) and above 130° F (54° C) at the lowest elevations.
I was foolhardy enough to drive through the Mojave Desert during summer - once. I never tried it again. It was blistering and no matter what precautions we took inside the car - shaded windows, a/c, plenty of ice and water, etc. - the trip was a nightmare.
Summer temperatures are known to reside around the 120°F (49 °C) in late July and early August in Needles also which explains the following world record or two.
Photo courtesy: Howlander/CC BY 2.0
With much of the U.S. continuing to suffer under the worst drought conditions in half-a-century, any rainy weather system at all might seem a refreshing sight -- but evidently, sometimes a T-storm can feel a lot like a tea-storm.
According to Weather Underground, the city of Needles, California, recently experienced what is believed to be the hottest rainfall on record. On Monday, not long after hitting a daytime high of 118°F (the hottest it's ever been there, by the way), a thunderstorm rolled through, dropping precipitation over the Mojave Desert town that reached a scorching 115° F.
"Monday's rain at 115° F in Needles sets a new world record for the hottest rain in world history," writes weather expert Dr. Jeff Masters.
But that wasn't the only record set that day. The rain fell with conditions at just 11 percent humidity, "the lowest humidity rain has ever occurred at anywhere on Earth in recorded history."
Due to the low humidity, however, only a scattering of the super-hot droplets reached the ground before evaporating, sparing unsuspecting residents from the full brunt of an oddly shower-like rain shower.
Dr. Master explains the science behind the scalding rain:It is exceedingly rare to get rain when the temperature rises above 100° F, since those kind of temperatures usually require a high pressure system with sinking air that discourages rainfall. Monday's rain in Needles was due to a flow of moisture coming from the south caused by the Southwest U.S. monsoon, a seasonal influx of moisture caused by the difference in temperature between the hot desert and the cooler ocean areas surrounding Mexico to the south.
Prior to Needles' record-setting rain, the hottest on record occurred in Saudi Arabia, reaching temperatures of 109°F. And, what might seem a mere arbitration, may in fact be a growing trend; to date, the top three hottest rainfalls on record have occurred within the last two years.
August 2011 ended a summer that brought record-breaking and near record-breaking warmth to the U.S. and the globe. Photo courtesy: NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
As relentless heat wave has followed relentless heat wave across the United States this summer, conversations have increasingly turned to the role of global warming in extreme weather events. A new study solidifies the link.
Before 1980, excessively hot summers were practically non-existent. More recently, found a new study, summers that averaged 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than normal have become common – covering about 10 percent of land area around the globe each year – up from an average of just a few tenths of a percent in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. In some recent years, super-hot summers have struck as much as 20 percent of the Northern Hemisphere.
Statistically, the pattern is too extreme to be considered a result of chance, found a new study, which pointed a finger directly at global warming as the underlying cause of the recent spike in extra-hot summers.
With projected warming over the next 50 years, the study predicted that summers averaging 5.5 Fahrenheit above normal will happen regularly. In a decade, nearly 17 percent of the globe will likely be experiencing scorching summers each year.
“The problem is that there’s always this caveat when people say, ‘Well, you can’t blame any individual event on global warming,’” said James Hansen, a climate scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
“But what we show is that you can blame this strong change in the bell curve (of temperature distributions) on global warming. And that change has really made a remarkable impact on the chance of the likelihood of extreme weather events.”
High-profile summer heat waves have fueled headlines around the globe in recent years. The historically hot summer of 2010 from Moscow to the Middle East was followed by a record-setting summer in Texas, Oklahoma, and Mexico in 2011. The summer of 2012 has already strained air-conditioners across the Midwest and eastern United States as well as parts of Canada.
Scientists often come up with meteorological reasons, including high-pressure systems and La Niña events, to explain individual heat waves. In an effort to see if there might be any larger trends, Hansen and colleagues analyzed seasonal temperature averages around the globe dating back to 1950.
When the researchers compared the period between 1951 and 1980 with the period since 1980, they found that average temperatures shifted toward the warmer in the latter period.
Even more striking, the team reports today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, anomalously hot summers – defined by average temperatures that were three standard deviations or 3.3 F hotter than normal – became far more common in recent decades. Hot summers directly raise the risk of damaging wildfires and devastating droughts.
Overall, the study found, temperatures are becoming more variable with more extremes at both ends, making cooler-than-average summers likely to happen in the coming years, as well. Global warming also increases levels of water vapor in the air, raising the likelihood of extreme snowfall, rainfall, and flooding in some places.
Those kinds of patterns can be confusing to a public that tends to take global warming more seriously when they are living through unusually warm weather.
“We increasingly think that one of the biggest determinants of whether people think climate change is real or not, or whether they think it’s severe or moderate, is their relatively recent experiences with local weather,” said Barry Rabe, a political scientist who studies environmental and energy policy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
For the past five or six years, Rabe and colleagues have been conducting nationwide polls to gauge the public’s attitudes toward climate change. Their results suggest that concern peaks during heat waves and wanes during cooler-than-normal seasons.
Policy changes also tend to happen not when scientists announce a rise in global average temperatures, but when an area faces some kind of imminent threat that is related to climate change. An infestation of mountain pine beetles as a result of warmer winters in British Columbia, for example, had a direct impact on the creation of a major carbon tax there.
The new study, then, may come at an opportune time – as long as the weather remains wiltingly hot.
“Generally, in public policy and environmental policy, the thinking is that things have to be pretty significant and severe in a vivid way for people to become concerned and governments to react,” Rabe said.
“Normally, we have seen major policy changes follow some kind of disaster, he added. “One of the big challenges with climate change is figuring out what is the crisis, what is the burden of proof, and what is the demonstrable evidence.”
Corn is the world's most used agricultural crop. Photo courtesy: Michael Dorausch/CC BY-SA 2.0
In the early spring of 2012, U.S. farmers were on their way to planting some 96 million acres in corn, the most in 75 years. A warm early spring got the crop off to a great start. Analysts were predicting the largest corn harvest on record.
The United States is the leading producer and exporter of corn, the world's feedgrain. At home, corn accounts for four-fifths of the U.S. grain harvest. Internationally, the U.S. corn crop exceeds China's rice and wheat harvests combined. Among the big three grains – corn, wheat, and rice – corn is now the leader, with production well above that of wheat and nearly double that of rice.
The corn plant is as sensitive as it is productive. Thirsty and fast-growing, it is vulnerable to both extreme heat and drought. At elevated temperatures, the corn plant, which is normally so productive, goes into thermal shock.
As spring turned into summer, the thermometer began to rise across the Corn Belt. In St. Louis, Missouri, in the southern Corn Belt, the temperature in late June and early July climbed to 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher 10 days in a row. For the past several weeks, the Corn Belt has been blanketed with dehydrating heat.
Weekly drought maps published by the University of Nebraska show the drought-stricken area spreading across more and more of the country until, by mid-July, it engulfed virtually the entire Corn Belt. Soil moisture readings in the Corn Belt are now among the lowest ever recorded.
While temperature, rainfall, and drought serve as indirect indicators of crop growing conditions, each week the U.S. Department of Agriculture releases a report on the actual state of the corn crop. This year the early reports were promising. On May 21st, 77 percent of the U.S. corn crop was rated as good to excellent. The following week the share of the crop in this category dropped to 72 percent. Over the next eight weeks, it dropped to 26 percent, one of the lowest ratings on record. The other 74 percent is rated very poor to fair. And the crop is still deteriorating.
Over a span of weeks, we have seen how the more extreme weather events that come with climate change can affect food security. Since the beginning of June, corn prices have increased by nearly one half, reaching an all-time high on July 19th.
Although the world was hoping for a good U.S. harvest to replenish dangerously low grain stocks, this is no longer in the cards. World carryover stocks of grain will fall further at the end of this crop year, making the food situation even more precarious. Food prices, already elevated, will follow the price of corn upward, quite possibly to record highs.
Not only is the current food situation deteriorating, but so is the global food system itself. We saw early signs of the unraveling in 2008 following an abrupt doubling of world grain prices. As world food prices climbed, exporting countries began restricting grain exports to keep their domestic food prices down. In response, governments of importing countries panicked. Some of them turned to buying or leasing land in other countries on which to produce food for themselves.
Welcome to the new geopolitics of food scarcity. As food supplies tighten, we are moving into a new food era, one in which it is every country for itself.
The world is in serious trouble on the food front. But there is little evidence that political leaders have yet grasped the magnitude of what is happening. The progress in reducing hunger in recent decades has been reversed. Unless we move quickly to adopt new population, energy, and water policies, the goal of eradicating hunger will remain just that.
Time is running out. The world may be much closer to an unmanageable food shortage – replete with soaring food prices, spreading food unrest, and ultimately political instability – than most people realize.
This piece originally appeared in The Guardian on Tuesday, July 24, 2012; and, was written by Lester R. Brown.
Lester R. Brown is President of Earth Policy Institute and author of Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity (release date: October 1, 2012).
Keeping water restrictions forefront in the public's mind even comes by way of bus advertisement. Photo courtesy: Bonnie Alter
I was sitting in my livingroom this afternoon watching the tradesperson power wash my balcony. Our complex has chosen to clean up the building and remove algal growth by the use of highly-pressurized water. As I watched the copious amounts of water being used drain off the balcony, I realized our complex had used enough water to supply a small village for one year for this one single purpose.
How totally wasteful when other countries are suffering through droughts with barely enough clean drinking water to satisfy the peoples' thirst.
It's the driest spring since 1976 and the south east part of England is under watering restrictions. They will affect 20 million people and there is a £1,000 ($1,500) fine for flouting the rules.
The cause is two years of very low rainfall and unseasonably dry weather. Reservoirs are well below normal levels and some tributaries of the Thames River have been reduced to mere trickles.
Water is precious and we should all be trying to use less of it in everyday life. During the last drought there was a 10% reduction in demand for water, so people can do it. The funny thing about the ban is that the restrictions are things that we should be doing all the time, not just during a drought.
For example, using grey water, which is recycled household water, to water plants.
One way around water restrictions is to collect rain water in a rain barrel or butt. Photo courtesy: crocus
--Getting a rainwater barrel (called butts in the UK) for the garden and collecting rain water in it. This can then be used to water plants. In fact, many people are doing this--so far three times the amount sold last year have already been snatched up by eager gardeners. Rain water is actually healthier for your plants than tap water as it does not have all the additives we put in our drinking water.
--Use a watering can to water plants: double the number of these have also been sold to date.
--Using a trickle irrigation system in the garden--they release the water gradually and are more efficient. Trickle irrigation systems can use approx. 50% less water than traditional irrigation systems.
--No filling the wading pool with a hose, although buckets of water are allowed.
--No filling up the swimming pool either.
--Washing your car with a bucket and elbow grease, not with the hose.
So how bad is it to use a hose? Apparently "hosepipes typically use 225 litres in 15 minutes – that's 900 litres in an hour. When used they tend to be left on for long periods of time, so a hosepipe ban is seen as a relatively effective way to cut down on excessive water usage."
The Trafalgar Square fountain. Photo courtesy: Mike Fleming
The glorious fountain in Trafalgar Square is going to be switched off as part of the ban. So will 29 other fountains in the London area. But not the Diana Memorial Fountain as it has its own borehole supply.
But even if everyone behaved and followed the ban, the problem would not be solved. Despite the best intentions, the real issue is the water companies: they lose 3.36 billion litres of water a day in leaks. If the leaks were fixed there would be more than enough water. Thames Water was the worst; losing more than 600 million litres a day.
The ban is crucial to saving wildlife which has suffered since the winter in some areas. One official explained "This hosepipe ban is an essential part of dealing with a crisis which could be devastating for wildlife in our countryside. Reducing demand now will help keep more water in the environment, keeping rivers flowing for longer and protecting their precious wildlife."
As for enforcing the ban...the seven water companies have said that they won't be because they've "got better things to do with our money, like fixing leaks."
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