Droughts likely to be even longer in the future due to climate change
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"Coming decades"???
The Colorado River is in a 24 year megadrought/aridification cycle (since 2000). That, combined with overallocation, means reservoir levels have been plummeting.
The Colorado River is in a 24 year megadrought/aridification cycle (since 2000). That, combined with overallocation, means reservoir levels have been plummeting.
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I've seen this personally the last ten years. Where I live in Canada, the weather patterns have changed significantly, especially in terms of rainfall.
When you look at the reports, the average rainfall over a month, you might think, "Oh, things haven't changed in 50 years - more - so there's no concern!" but what those graphs don't tell you is that we're now getting that rainfall all at once - in the space of 30 minutes - once a month or less, and the fields bake under a sun 10C warmer than it was thirty years ago the rest of the time.
When you look at the reports, the average rainfall over a month, you might think, "Oh, things haven't changed in 50 years - more - so there's no concern!" but what those graphs don't tell you is that we're now getting that rainfall all at once - in the space of 30 minutes - once a month or less, and the fields bake under a sun 10C warmer than it was thirty years ago the rest of the time.
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Is it pessimistic or realistic to say that we won't make it pass 2050 if nothing changed today?
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We'd make it, don't doubt it. What that might look like really depends on if we can pull together to ensure everyone has access to whatever resources and technology are available for a comfortable life or if a handful of people grab a disproportionate share and restrict access to the benefit of an elite while the rest of humanity updates the recipes in To Serve Man.
I know where my money's at.
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Mad Max movies may have missed the part where water is more important than gasoline.
For our part, we will transition to a state where whatever the grid does or does NOT provide doesn’t matter, early next year.
The solar setup is the most “fragile” but we are old and ill, so 5-10 years is far longer than we will likely need.
For our part, we will transition to a state where whatever the grid does or does NOT provide doesn’t matter, early next year.
The solar setup is the most “fragile” but we are old and ill, so 5-10 years is far longer than we will likely need.
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As a hunter, I don't need science (though I absolutely do appreciate it) to see the effects of climate change. Deer season opens mid-September. When I started hunting, 30 or so years ago, it was not uncommon to have cold, wet weather. Many times, that included snow. Today, that is no longer the case. Temperature are in the 85+ plus and we are lucky to see rain (forget snow) by the end of October (end of season).
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We'll make it past 2050.
Saturday, October 23, 2077 is when the shit will really hit the fan
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We'll make it. Migration of people will be massive. Price of food will increase. Availability of food will decrease.
People will steal food they can't afford to buy, simply to survive.
We're in for a very uncomfortable future.
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Team Tardigrade
Ars Centurion
A big part of the issue is that most climate deniers are betting on literal divine intervention to save the planet. Why do anything now if god's going to come along and fix everything?
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Things are definitely going to get messier in the coming years and decades. And I do agree with the article in that even developed countries are at risk.
Recently the city of Calgary in Alberta had a nasty feeder main break that crippled water supply even when there was abundant water. The extra repairs are complete and they are now charging the line. I shudder to think what would've happened if the feeder main broke during a dry spell and there was not enough water to refill and flush the main after repairs were completed. Now that is infrastructure risk, but an inconvenience of reduced water usage could've become catastrophic if the timing was different.
Now droughts are also going to introduce another feedback loop that wasn't mentioned in the article. During times of drought groundwater is frequently touted as a solution to water security. The thing is that many rivers are sustained by groundwater during low precipitation and low snow melt periods. So by pumping out groundwater, you are also reducing base flow to the rivers, streams, and springs. In a drought more people turn to groundwater which reduces base flow to rivers which reduces available water which increases groundwater demand and so on.
To make matters worse, at least in Alberta you can have a groundwater well be unlicensed if you meet certain criteria such as only for domestic use or for traditional agriculture within certain limits. None of those wells have use reporting requirements like larger groundwater diversion licenses and there are easily thousands of those across the province. Aquifers are being used and there isn't enough data to understand how stressed they are.
Drought is bad enough, but there is an absolutely massive water crisis that is going to be coming on top of all the nasty associated with climate change. If there's one thing that keeps me up at night, that is it.
Recently the city of Calgary in Alberta had a nasty feeder main break that crippled water supply even when there was abundant water. The extra repairs are complete and they are now charging the line. I shudder to think what would've happened if the feeder main broke during a dry spell and there was not enough water to refill and flush the main after repairs were completed. Now that is infrastructure risk, but an inconvenience of reduced water usage could've become catastrophic if the timing was different.
Now droughts are also going to introduce another feedback loop that wasn't mentioned in the article. During times of drought groundwater is frequently touted as a solution to water security. The thing is that many rivers are sustained by groundwater during low precipitation and low snow melt periods. So by pumping out groundwater, you are also reducing base flow to the rivers, streams, and springs. In a drought more people turn to groundwater which reduces base flow to rivers which reduces available water which increases groundwater demand and so on.
To make matters worse, at least in Alberta you can have a groundwater well be unlicensed if you meet certain criteria such as only for domestic use or for traditional agriculture within certain limits. None of those wells have use reporting requirements like larger groundwater diversion licenses and there are easily thousands of those across the province. Aquifers are being used and there isn't enough data to understand how stressed they are.
Drought is bad enough, but there is an absolutely massive water crisis that is going to be coming on top of all the nasty associated with climate change. If there's one thing that keeps me up at night, that is it.
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I took a look at the article, and like the fact that this article focused on the SSP2-4.5, which is a middle-of-the road scenario where CO2 levels peak mid-century, decrease, but don't drop to zero by 2100. The other model in the study is the SSP5-8.5, which leads to double the current carbon dioxide level by 2100. Lots of articles focus popularizing numbers based on the latter, which I think is unrealistic, to create click-bait.
Kudos.
Kudos.
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Not everyone is going to make it past 2050, but that's always true for any situation.
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The water really doesn't go away, it just moves somewhere else as the climate and weather patterns change. Just ask the Sahara and the Ahramat branch of the Nile. The pyramids used to be river front property.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01379-7
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01379-7
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Pessimistic. 2050 is now said to be the deadline of where we need to hit net zero if we want to keep the results this side of utterly dystopian catastrophic by the time of 2100. If we manage that it will still be fairly bad - as in hundreds of millions dead bad, most areas shafted to some extent and a lot of agri zones and watersheds either moved or permanently gone.
That said, we are already falling significantly short of the pace we need to hit in emission reductions in order to meet that goal.
The issue is that warming doesn't stop 2100. If we meet every goal we'll simply have managed to slow it down to what scientists believe is a pace at which we'll have time to address and mitigate risks and threat for vulnerable areas to some extent.
But by 2050? What we're already seeing will be quite clearly spelled out. Some areas may already have suffered disasters. Most of us here will live to see the beginning of what will be a rapidly escalating slide into the hellscape we will be leaving the next few generations.
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I can confirm this observation (anecdotal, but supported by dozens of measurements) from the other side of the Atlantic, in West/Northern Europe.
Summers here used to be mild and rainy, with a few weeks of sunshine here and there. The last few years, we've moved into a pattern of 2-3 months of drought and very high temperatures (for the region at least), to the point that fish had to be manually rescued from drying canals last year! That is followed by a period of intense rainfall which threatens or creates floods.
Drought and flood, flood and drought, that appears to be the new rhythm, with the mildness all gone. This is *not" fine!
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Meanwhile of course areas which used to have just about enough of water are getting too much of it. The last few years have seen recurring freak weather phenomena keeping vast rain storms in holding patterns over small regions, causing massive flooding in Germany, Sweden & Norway, and this year, Poland.
Which was predictable. As global warming escalates the weather and climate patterns shift. Most cities and areas today within habitable zones are likely to see drastic record-breaking shifts in water availability, weather, peak and low temperatures, and so on.
If your infrastructure is geared towards a certain amount of water and a certain type of weather because that's what's existed in that region for the last thousand years then that infrastructure will be massively overburdened fairly soon.
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They're using the standard models and emissions scenarios used by the IPCC, which are - and pardon my slightly unscientific average - dead nuts accurate and beyond question by lazy internet climate deniers.
Not sure where you're getting your information - actually, I am, of course - but of course we've had major droughts since the 1930s and 50s, and generalizing average rainfall across the entire US land mass is nonsense. The west and southwest are far below average, the northeast and midwest is above average, winter precipitation is way up in the southern Plains but below average in the intermountain West, Spring precipitation is down in California and the South, summer precipitation is up in California and the midwest but down in Appalachia and average in the South.....news flash, it's a big fucking country and averaging across a territory 2800 miles east to west and 1600 miles north to south is meaningless to the point of bullshit.
You can say that all you want, doesn't make in an accurate or informed statement. And just as a pro tip: you need to understand what an average is and what a trend represents, or you'll make a fool of yourself mistaking interannual variability for long-term trends.
And there it is, the mask slip!
*benefit
Siberia and Alaska really don't want two and a half million acre wildfires like Siberia saw in 2022, no.
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I'm assuming that we'll resort to geoengineering at some point -- it's the only way we have a chance of avoiding the dystopian future we're rushing headlong towards.
Whether or not geoengineering will work as it should, well, that's less clear. Once we do it, there's no going back.
Alternatively, there's always a nuclear winter to combat climate change. I hear it's the bomb.
Otherwise, yeah, as someone already wrote -- it's going to be brutal.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I'm not so sure. We're already working on the low hanging fruit when it comes to emissions. For even the middle-of-the-road scenario to apply we will have to reduce the individual carbon footprint per capita by a frankly humbling amount.
The average american produces a carbon footprint of 20 tons of CO2 annually, just considering lifestyle and consumer habits. The global average is 4. The desired result? 2.
https://www.inspirecleanenergy.com/blog/clean-energy-101/average-american-carbon-footprint
I can seee this being a bit of an issue even over here in europe. The source I was looking at didn't have the numbers or the average european but assuming it's somewhere between the global average and the US we're still looking at the individual citizen over here having to curb and adapt consumer habits until we hit a quarter or less of what we currently cause in emissions.
How americans will react to what they'll have to do to cut their emissions by an entire order of magnitude is anybody's guess.
Between the sheer amount of performative greenwashing, backsliding and heel-dragging from almost all of the commercial industries globally, I'm not too sure the worst scenario is that implausible.
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Who cares. I'll either be dead or close to dead by then at 75
/s off, Just to illustrate what most people think, I think. The prevalent attitude of people is sadly just blatant selfishness
(And the 75=dead reference, My family is very not long lived unfortunately. Probably gone for 10 years by then)
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I mean, yeah, I think geoengineering will work, for some definitions of work. But what's going to happen is, we're going to do a frantic about face when something just really, truly, incredibly awful happens climatewise, and we're going to rush into geoengineering as a short-term emergency fix.
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Are you seeing anything - anything at all - that suggests the international community is even remotely serious about mitigating carbon emissions?
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"5 days" completely undersells the problem. We are already seeing much more boom and bust and water storage is hard at scale. Reservoirs only go so far and also when it is hot and dry, they evaporate. When they're designed to catch rainfall over a year, they cannot catch all of that rainfall occurring in a single day. As the vegetation and soils dry, the air becomes drier, making the situation worse and worse in a terrible feedback loop. What's normal for my area is cool, foggy mornings on the valley floor, with warm afternoons. During drought, the ground is dry and heat begins at sunrise, becoming much much hotter in the afternoon.
In California, a huge percentage of the state's water supply is stored as snow in the Sierras. But most of that snow falls at around 28-30F - ie -1 to -2 Celsius. If we even take the naive thing and just bump those temps up by that 1-2 C, even if it happens for just one big storm: it all falls as rain. This creates a megaflood on its own, and on top of that, washes what snow there is out to the rivers and out to sea, causing tremendous flooding, and leaving effectively no water storage behind.
In California, a huge percentage of the state's water supply is stored as snow in the Sierras. But most of that snow falls at around 28-30F - ie -1 to -2 Celsius. If we even take the naive thing and just bump those temps up by that 1-2 C, even if it happens for just one big storm: it all falls as rain. This creates a megaflood on its own, and on top of that, washes what snow there is out to the rivers and out to sea, causing tremendous flooding, and leaving effectively no water storage behind.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Worse.
All too many of them are betting that the sky wizard won't fix the planet. He'll just be forced to show up early and rapture all the believers (only the ones believing the right thing, the right way of course) while sending literally everyone else to eternal torment.
It's about what you'd expect from people who ostensibly worship the conspicuously white-skinned "Prince of Love and Peace" - Supply Side Jesus - who totes an AR-15 with which to smite the unbeliever and encourages the "rugged individualist" while ensuring that "poverty" is an aspect of which only the undeserving suffer.
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I think a lot of people in the eastern US think they're immune to drought, that it's just a problem for the west. But they're the area that has much less water storage, and we know that heat domes and drought can take hold there as well. And when they do, they have far less infrastructure to cope.
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A subsidiary of Shell pushing the "Carbon footprint" lie. Nice.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
That's really making "adjust to change" do a lot of heavy lifting.
What you're missing in your example is that the city of Ur literally isn't habitable by human beings today. When that same shift happens over the span of decades rather than millennia we're going to be looking at a staggering death toll. Which will not be helped by the sheer scale modern cities are at compared to one of the first congregation of mud huts in ancient history big enough to be called a city.
Bluntly put, if you've got a major city with a population in the millions and from one decade to the next the water supply goes from "scarce" to "not enough for everyone" you will see panic on a scale we don't really have a metric for. Even massive earthquakes still leave survivors with roughly the same amount of food and water available.
When that is a new normal happening to most major population centers we're going to see some utterly dystopian results of civil strife and rioting on top of famine, starvation, pandemics and all that other good stuff you get when we get to test the old lay about humanity only ever being five meals away from famine.
To whit, by 2100 most of the US south will have to move into the US north. Fairly rapidly. A situation few north american city has or will by then have the water supply, sanitation, health care, law enforcement etc to cope with. The same will happen globally.
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I wonder at what point it starts making sense to incentivize people to relocate to places with a surplus of water, rather than engaging in Herculean efforts to supply water to places where it's not really practical for people to live anymore?
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World Bank has a dataset with CO2 emissions (metric tons per capita) available here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC
According to these data, in 2020 the per capita US emissions was 13.0 tons per year. To put this in perspective, the average per capita emissions in China were 7.8 tons.
All the three major EU countries are below China, in per capita terms: 7.3 tons Germany, 4.0 France and 4.7 Italy. This is cleary connected with the way electricity is generated: France has a lot of nuclear, Italy natural gas and Germany coal.
A very interesting metric is also the GDP carbon intensity, or GDP over CO2 emissions: the most aggressive the carbon reduction undertaken by an economy, the more $$ you can obtain per tons of CO2 emitted.
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The mismanagement of the Colorado River is a classic example of tragedy of the commons.
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Now. But since it would mean finding a way to not bankrupt the people moving or leaving them in lifetime debt (you still owe $500,000 on this house no one wants because it's projected to be in a desert in ten years) and that would mean transferring money from those that could literally wipe their asses with hundreds for generations and never notice to those that need it and you know how likely that is to happen.
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There is nowhere in the US where it is not practical for people to live anymore. There are places where it's not practical to have golf courses and flood-irrigated agriculture and thermoelectric power, but there's nowhere that can't provide enough water for baseline municipal use.
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This is an argument that I have seen thrown around and it supposes that anything north of the interior plains of North America is just agricultural land waiting to happen once the permafrost thaws. Now permafrost thaws is bad news (methane releases), but I can promise you that most of the terrain up there is definitely not suitable for agriculture easily for the next 100 years or more.
Simply put, there isn't a lot of soil up there. There's a thin veneer on the permafrost, but aside from that, bedrock is very close to the surface and roots can't go very deep. There's a reason why the tundra can only support heathers and mosses.
In the Taiga, the soils are a bit more developed but have an acidity problem. Because of the prevalence of conifers and also muskeg swamps and marshes, the soil is too acidic to support agriculture. You would need an awful lot of soil amendment to bring the soil pH to a useful range. And while the soil is more developed, it is mostly weathered bedrock and not the needed organic rich topsoil that agriculture relies on.
In summary, nicer weather in arctic regions doesn't translate to productive land in an agricultural sense. No one is going to benefit from climate change.
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