Drought / heat wave

new category, 8/14 belated

see TWO

7/15 added heat wave but could grow to sep cats

this refers to esp Western US drought 2010-

bak 420 html /southwests

see Arab Spring (global weirding --> disruption/ chaos

see also water, hunger

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2022 6 22 an

international delegates left Germany Friday following the Bonn Climate Change Conference, climate campaigners called the talks, which lasted 10 days this month, an "utter failure" for neglecting to establish plans to support the Global South in adapting to the planetary crisis—months after developing countries demanded aid at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Scotland.

"It is unconscionable that developed countries continue to kick the issue of financing for loss and damage down the road—first COP26, now Bonn," saidJeni Miller, executive director of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, referring to the impacts of the climate crisis which developing nations have already suffered and demanding that the issue get badly-needed attention at upcoming talks.

"Such financing would enable countries to deal with the impacts on their people’s lives and livelihoods, homes and health systems, and must be a core component of the COP27 agenda," Miller added.

deepening campaigners' anger was the fact that European countries present at the Bonn conference are currently boosting fossil fuel imports to replace the gas shipments they previously received from Russia, which were largely discontinued after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine earlier this year.

"The E.U. completely misses the point of what it is to be a climate leader," said Chiara Martinelli, director of Climate Action Network Europe. "European countries also urgently need to massively ramp up their climate and energy targets, rather than displace oil and gas from Russia with those from developing countries, further locking them into fossil fuels. That's what climate leaders should do."

Focusing on sourcing new fossil fuels from overseas while "consistently" blocking discussions about loss and damage financing in Bonn "exposed [the E.U.'s] hypocritical stance," saidHarjeet Singh, the group's senior climate impacts advisor.

Patricia Espinosa, the outgoing executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), claimed the talks in Bonn took steps "in several technical areas" including a "global stocktake" mechanism, which will allow officials to assess international progress toward the target of limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

That view,said Aurore Mathieu, international policy coordinator for Climate Action Network France, highlights "the huge disconnect between the urgency of the climate crisis and the inability to progress on concrete outcomes to respond to it."

"Climate impacts are worsening throughout the world, hitting the most marginalized communities, and rich countries are still refusing to acknowledge their climate debt by providing finance for loss and damage," said Mathieu.

Wealthy countries, added Sara Shaw of Friends of the Earth International, are "sleepwalking us all into catastrophe," noting that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that the world only has three years at most to reach peak carbon emissions before they must begin reducing them.

"The disconnect between the accelerating climate crisisoutside the conference halls and the lack of concrete action inside is palpable," saidShaw. "Developed countries refuse to even discuss long owed and vital loss and damage finance. Instead of taking action, rich countries are trying to shift responsibility for action to developing countries, while expanding their own plans to extract fossil fuels and chasing unproven technofixes."

"We know the solution is a rapid and equitable phase out of fossil fuels and a shift to people-centered renewables," she added.

The climate talks took place as Delhi, India faced a severe heatwavein which meteorologists have recorded temperatures of 107°F and above for 25 days since the summer began.

Indian delegates were among those who demanded in Bonn that wealthy countries help provide "massive funding so the government can prepare for extreme weather events by building early warning systems."

The climate emergency has also pushed Madagascar toward the planet's first climate-fueled famine and is expected by 2050 to internally displace 86 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, 40 million in South Asia, 19 million in North Africa, and 17 million in Latin America.

"One out of five people in Africa are suffering from hunger, and this is just one of countless ways the climate crisis is spurring devastation that is ripping through our communities," said Hellen Neima, Africa climate director for Corporate Accountability International. "We have had enough of rich, polluting countries silencing those trying to fight for justice."

"We have had enough of you offering crumbs with one hand while you starve the world with the other," Neima added. "We have had enough of our lives being valued as less worthy than Big Polluters' profits... Your empty words cannot fill our stomachs or protect our homelands. People in Africa are rising up and will continue to rise up, until the justice that is owed is delivered at COP27."

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Dangerous urban heat exposure has tripled since the 1980s, with the poor most at risk

Cascade Tuholske, Columbia University; Chris Funk, University of California Santa Barbara, and Kathryn Grace, University of Minnesota

Hot, humid population centers are becoming epicenters of heat risk as climate changes worsens. It’s calling into question the conventional wisdom that urbanization uniformly reduces poverty....

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/western-fires/

many graf

The Western U.S. appears headed for another dangerous fire season, and a new study shows that even high mountain areas once considered too wet to burn are at increasing risk as the climate warms.

Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. West is in severe to exceptional drought right now, including large parts of the Rocky Mountains, Cascades and Sierra Nevada. The situation is so severe that the Colorado River basin is on the verge of its first official water shortage declaration, and forecasts suggest another hot, dry summer is on the way.

Warm and dry conditions like these are a recipe for wildfire disaster.

In a new study published May 24, 2021, our team of fire and climate scientists and engineers found that forest fires are now reaching higher, normally wetter elevations. And they are burning there at rates unprecedented in recent fire history.

While some people focus on historical fire suppression and other forest management practices as reasons for the West's worsening fire problem, these high-elevation forests have had little human intervention. The results provide a clear indication that climate change is enabling these normally wet forests to burn.

As wildfires creep higher up mountains, another tenth of the West's forest area is now at risk, according to our study. That creates new hazards for mountain communities, with impacts on downstream water supplies and the plants and wildlife that call these forests home.

Map showing how high-elevation forest fires advanced uphill.

Forest fires advanced to higher elevations as the climate dried from 1984 to 2017. Every 200 meters equals 656 feet.

Mojtaba Sadegh, CC BY-ND

Rising fire risk in the high mountains

In the new study, we analyzed records of all fires larger than 1,000 acres (405 hectares) in the mountainous regions of the contiguous Western U.S. between 1984 and 2017.

The amount of land that burned increased across all elevations during that period, but the largest increase occurred above 8,200 feet (2,500 meters). To put that elevation into perspective, Denver – the mile-high city – sits at 5,280 feet, and Aspen, Colorado, is at 8,000 feet. These high-elevation areas are largely remote mountains and forests with some small communities and ski areas.

The area burning above 8,200 feet more than tripled in 2001-2017 compared with 1984-2000.

One of Colorado's largest wildfires, 2020's East Troublesome Fire, crossed the Continental Divide and was burning at elevations around 9,000 feet in October, when snow normally would have been falling.

AP Photo/David Zalubowski

Our results show that climate warming has diminished the high-elevation flammability barrier – the point where forests historically were too wet to burn regularly because the snow normally lingered well into summer and started falling again early in the fall. Fires advanced about 826 feet (252 meters) uphill in the Western mountains over those three decades.

The Cameron Peak Fire in Colorado in 2020 was the state's largest fire in its history, burning over 208,000 acres (84,200 hectares) and is a prime example of a high-elevation forest fire. The fire burned in forests extending to 12,000 feet (3,650 meters) and reached the upper tree line of the Rocky Mountains.

We found that rising temperatures in the past 34 years have helped to extend the fire territory in the West to an additional 31,470 square miles (81,500 square kilometers) of high-elevation forests. That means a staggering 11% of all Western U.S. forests – an area similar in size to South Carolina – are susceptible to fire now that weren't three decades ago.

Can't blame fire suppression here

In lower-elevation forests, several factors contribute to fire activity, including the presence of more people in wildland areas and a history of fire suppression.

In the early 1900s, Congress commissioned the U.S. Forest Service to manage forest fires, which resulted in a focus on suppressing fires – a policy that continued through the 1970s. This caused flammable underbrush that would normally be cleared out by occasional natural blazes to accumulate. The increase in biomass in many lower elevation forests across the West has been associated with increases in high-severity fires and megafires. At the same time, climate warming has dried out forests in the Western U.S., making them more prone to large fires.

On average, fires have spread 826 feet (252 meters) higher into the mountains in recent decades, exposing an additional 31,400 square miles (81,500 square kilometers) of forests to fire.

Mojtaba Sadegh, CC BY-ND

By focusing on high-elevation fires, in areas with little history of fire suppression, we can more clearly see the influence of climate change.

Most high-elevation forests haven't been subjected to much fire suppression, logging or other human activities, and because trees at these high elevations are in wetter forests, they historically have long return intervals between fires, typically a century or more. Yet they experienced the highest rate of increase in fire activity in the past 34 years. We found that the increase is strongly correlated with the observed warming.

High mountain fires create new problems

High-elevation fires have implications for natural and human systems.

High mountains are natural water towers that normally provide a sustained source of water to millions of people in dry summer months in the Western U.S. The scars that wildfires leave behind – known as burn scars – affect how much snow can accumulate at high elevations. This can influence the timing, quality and quantity of water that reaches reservoirs and rivers downstream.

High-elevation fires also remove standing trees that act as anchor points that normally stabilize the snowpack, raising the risk of avalanches.

The loss of tree canopy also exposes mountain streams to the Sun, increasing water temperatures in the cold headwater streams. Increasing stream temperatures can harm fish and the larger wildlife and predators that rely on them.

Climate change is increasing fire risk in many regions across the globe, and studies show that this trend will continue as the planet warms. The increase in fires in the high mountains is another warning to the U.S. West and elsewhere of the risks ahead as the climate changes.

Mojtaba Sadegh, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, Boise State University; John Abatzoglou, Associate Professor of Engineering, University of California, Merced, and Mohammad Reza Alizadeh, Ph.D. Student in Engineering, McGill University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Species in Tropics, Polar Regions, Will be Hardest Hit

In the study, Pigot's team assessed temperatures ranges for more than 30,000 land and sea species—birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish and other marine animals and plants—to estimate when they will start experiencing unprecedented temperature conditions. Capping global warming at 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit would decrease the risk of ecosystem failures significantly, but allowing global warming to continue unchecked would lead to widespread biodiversity decline quickly, they found.

Ecological communities in tropical regions near the equators will be hard hit because many species there are already living near the upper end of their heat tolerance spectrum. In high latitudes, toward the poles, communities of species will struggle because those areas are warming about twice as fast as the global average, giving them even less time to adapt, he said....

Hottest Places in a City Are Often Low-Income Neighborhoods

EXTREME WEATHER

new Study Projects Severe Water Shortages in the Colorado River Basin

BY: BOB BERWYN

:{:{}:

The loss of the reflective snowpack drives evaporation and reduces the flow of water, the study found. Read More}:

it's not just the threat of heat stress that is escalating. Our new research shows thatrising temperatures due to climate change are making some pesticides up to 100 times as toxic.Current laws leave farmworkers at grave risk of injury and death—but we can help change that.

Urge your US representative to cosponsor the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act

[talkies 1/2/20 2010 drought russia lost 1/3 wht crop --> arab spring?! food scarce africa and ME, food #1 expebnse in poor ppl budget --> anger at elites, libya, syria WAR, threat multiplier]

https://www.ecowatch.com/sydney-water-shortage-2641353372.html

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1119 icn

Military Bases Face Increasingly Dangerous Heat as Climate Changes

BY: DAVID HASEMYER

By mid-century, troops could face an extra month of extreme heat days if nothing is done to lower greenhouse gas emissions, a new report shows. Some training bases will see much worse.

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HEAT WAVES

57 Dead, 18,000 Hospitalized in Japan Heat Wave

Aug 07

India Set to Lower ‘Normal Rain’ Baseline as Droughts Bite

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icn 719

Ravaged by Drought, a Honduran Village Faces a Choice: Pray for Rain or Migrate

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08072019/climate-change-migration-honduras-drought-crop-failure-farming-deforestation-guatemala-trump

HEAT DEATH

150 million trees died in California’s drought, and worse is to come

6/25/19 dn indian city 4 dry reservoirs, wells not safe

2 mil migrant workers in san joachin vly

RR did immigration reform that included acctability for hiring illlegals, never implemented b/c big ag did not want it

UN study drought --> hunger centr am 1 tortilla/day! 2.1 mill hungry

bath riots texas ft carmelita louse bath every day, naked pix posted in bars. latx rosa parks

hunter sr got border wall built san diego, forced ppl in desert who died; bro rocket sci studied routes and started water stations

history pete w behind 20 pts kathleen brown, prop 187 boosted polls

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-june-25-2019/

john carlos frey sp bk sand and blood

ew 619

Taking action to stop the mercury from rising is a matter of life and death in the U.S., according to a new study published in the journal Science Advances.

ew spike?

Tens of Thousands Flee Extreme Heatwave in India as Temperatures Topping 120°F Kill Dozens Across Country

HEAT WAVES

36 Die in India Heat Wave, Delhi Records Its Highest All-Time Temperature

EXTREME WEATHER

619 dailly kos

Rare and strange’: Clash over water kills 15 monkeys in India during brutal heatwave

In India, WhatsApp is a weapon of antisocial hatred

Rohit Chopra, Santa Clara University

India's parliamentary elections, now underway, will show how social media is affecting Indian society and government.

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AGW //INEQUALITY (and increases?)

reverse matthew: poor get poorer/ EJ 1st and worst, tho did not cause

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22042019/climate-change-inequality-gdp-equator-africa-russia-norway-canada

A few countries in cold climates, including Canada, Norway and Russia, likely benefited economically from global warming in past decades, while poorer countries closer to the equator suffered economic losses, a new study says.

The findings suggest that climate change exacerbated global inequality, causing the most economic harm to those who did the least to cause it.

But what the future will look like is less clear. Research has shown that over the long term, just about every part of the world will suffer as global temperatures rise.

The study looked at each country's per capita GDP—the per-person value of the country's economic activity—over several decades from as early as 1961 to 2010, and then used climate models to estimate what each country's GDP would have been without the influence of global warming.

"India, for example, has approximately 30 percent lower per capita GDP today than if global warming had not occurred," said Noah Diffenbaugh, the study's lead author and an earth sciences professor at Stanford University. "In India there are hundreds of millions of people living below $2 a day. A 30 percent reduction in per capita GDP is substantial. That is the order of magnitude of the economic impacts during the Great Depression here in the United States."

When the authors compared their findings across countries, they found the greatest harm to GDP in poorer countries closer to the equator, while a few northern countries showed a GDP gain compared to the model of a world without global warming. The study looked at changes from 1961 to 2010 for those countries with available data, and also from 1991 to 2010 when more national data was available. The United States showed a loss of less than 1 percent, according to the study. [map graf]....

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31012019/colorado-river-water-crisis-climate-science-state-conservation-plans

Beyond Drought: 7 States Rebalance Their Colorado River Use as Global Warming Dries the Region

As major reservoirs shrink with the changing climate, seven states seek a sustainable future for the critical regional water source.

STORYNOV 27, 2018

How a Climate Change-Fueled Drought & U.S.-Fed Violence Are Driving Thousands from Central America

http://religioner.no/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/religioner.no_wcas-d-13-00059.pdf

Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria

PETER H. GLEICK Pacific Institute, Oakland, California

abstract: The devastating civil war that began in Syria in March 2011 is the result of complex interrelated factors. The focus of the conflict is regime change, but the triggers include a broad set of religious and sociopolitical factors, the erosion of the economic health of the country, a wave of political reform sweeping over the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Levant region, and challenges associated with climate variability and change and the availability and use of freshwater.

As described here, water and climatic conditions have played a direct role in the deterioration of Syria’s economic conditions. There is a long history of conflicts over water in these regions because of the natural water scarcity, the early development of irrigated agriculture, and complex religious and ethnic diversity. In recent years, there has been an increase in incidences of water-related violence around the world at the subnational level attributable to the role that water plays in development disputes and economic activities. Because conflicts are rarely, if ever, attributable to single causes, conflict analysis and concomitant efforts at reducing the risks of conflict must consider a multitude of complex relationships and contributing factors. This paper assesses the complicated connections between water and conflict in Syria, looks more broadly at future climate-related risks for water systems, and offers some water management strategies for reducing those risks.

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https://www.ecowatch.com/nestle-water-california-2582073595.html

U.S. Allows Nestlé to Keep Piping Water From Drought-Ridden Southern California

The U.S. Forest Service offered Nestlé a three-year permit on Wednesday to keep taking millions of gallons of water from the San Bernardino National Forest in California, the Associated Press reported.

The offer has certain restrictions. Nestlé, which sells bottled water under the Arrowhead brand, can continue piping from the Strawberry Creek watershed "when there is water available consistent with the forest's Land Management Plan," according to the AP, citing the Forest Service offer. The watershed is currently rated as "impaired."

...California has suffered from years of recurring drought. Last year's record-breaking rains in the state's north brought some relief, but large swaths of the south—where the forest is located—remain in "severe" drought, according to the latest data from the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Nestlé has 60 days to decide whether to accept the terms of the offer.

The Swiss food and beverage giant has been criticized by environmentalists for depriving the region's plants and animals of water. Additonally, the company had only paid an annual $524 permit fee to siphon off as much as 162 million gallons of water a year from Strawberry Creek and sell it back to the public in plastic bottles. Furthermore, that permit expired in 1988.

In 2015, the Forest Service was sued by environmental and public interest groups, who accused Nestlé of being allowed to operate its Strawberry Creek pipeline on a permit that expired 30 years ago.

The case was settled earlier this month, and required the agency to decide in 30 days whether or not to issue a new permit for the water pipeline and the company's associated activities in the San Bernardino National Forest.

Nestlé spokeswoman Alix Dunn told the AP the company provided 70 environmental studies during the application process and will "carefully review" the Forest Service offer.

"Californians are passionate about water and so are we," she added. "We take our responsibility as a California water steward seriously and Arrowhead's successful operations for more than a century point to our commitment to long-term sustainability."

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https://www.ecowatch.com/india-water-crisis-2579202142.html

:{:{}:

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https://www.ecowatch.com/humidity-climate-change-2520059578.html

Humidity Is the Real Heatwave Threat

By Alex Kirby

When the mercury climbs to extreme levels, it's the dangerous humidity produced by heat reacting with water-sodden air that can spell death, not just the heat alone.

U.S. researchers have warned yet again of the need to beware the risks of this combination. With fierce heat waves expected to become more common as the climate warms, they say humidity can greatly intensify the effects of the heat by itself.

They report in the journal Environmental Research Letters that during this century the drastic effects of high humidity in many areas will increase significantly. At times, they may overtake people's ability to work outdoors or, in some cases, even to survive.

Health and economies would suffer, especially in regions where people work outside and have little access to air conditioning. Potentially affected regions include large swathes of the already muggy Southeastern U.S., the Amazon, Western and Central Africa; Southern areas of the Middle East, including the Arabian peninsula; northern India; and eastern China.

"The conditions we're talking about basically never occur now—people in most places have never experienced them," said lead author Ethan Coffel, a graduate student at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "But they're projected to occur close to the end of the century."

The warming climate is projected to make many now-dry areas dryer, in part by changing precipitation patterns. But, as global temperatures rise, the atmosphere can hold more water vapor. That means chronically humid areas may only get more humid.

Muggy heat is more oppressive than the "dry" kind, because humans and other mammals cool down by sweating; sweat evaporates off the skin into the air, taking the excess heat with it. That works well in a desert. But when the air is already laden with moisture, evaporation off the skin slows down and eventually becomes impossible.

When this cooling process stops, a creature's core body temperature rises beyond the narrow tolerable range. Without air conditioning, organs strain and then start to fail, leading to lethargy, sickness and possibly death.

Using global climate models, the researchers mapped current and projected future "wet-bulb" temperatures, which reflect the combined effects of heat and humidity (the measurement is made by draping a water-saturated cloth over the bulb of a conventional thermometer; it does not correspond directly to air temperature alone).

The study found that by the 2070s, high wet-bulb readings that now occur perhaps only once a year could stretch to 100 to 250 days annually in some parts of the tropics. In the Southeastern U.S., wet-bulb temperatures now sometimes reach 29 or 30°C; by the 2070s or 2080s, such weather could occur 25 to 40 days each year, say the researchers....

https://www.ecowatch.com/california-droughts-arctic-ice-2516568052.html

Receding ice cover in the Arctic ocean could produce more droughts in California, according to a new study.

Published last week in Nature Communications, the study found that sea ice loss in the Arctic—of the proportion expected in coming years—could set off an atmospheric effect that will steer precipitation away from California. Notably, the study linked Arctic sea ice loss with the development of an atmospheric ridging system that also played a central role in the state's 2012-2016 drought.

az phoenix airport closed

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7/16 new report out

http://www.alternet.org/environment/lethal-heat-waves-will-threaten-majority-humankind-centurys-end

By 2100, if nations continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rates, three out of four people will be at risk from lethal heat waves.

And even if the governments of the world act on promises they made in 2015 and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, almost one in two could face the risk of sickness and death by intolerable heat.

That is because, as the temperatures rise, heat and humidity begin to challenge human physiology. Humans are adapted to body temperatures of around 37°C. If humidity—the levels of water vapour in the air—go up with the thermometer, then people caught in a zone of extreme heat cannot adjust body temperatures by perspiration.

And with every 1°C rise in temperatures, the capacity of the air to hold moisture goes up by 7 percent. People with no access to air conditioning or a cool breeze become at high risk.

It happened in Europe in 2003, when an estimated 70,000 died. A heat wave in Moscow in 2010 killed around 10,000. And researchers warned years ago that under global warming predictions, more such extremes of heat would become inevitable by 2020.

“We are running out of choices for the future,” said Camilo Mora, a geographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who led the study.

“For heat waves, our options are now between bad or terrible. Many people around the world are already paying the ultimate price of heat waves, and while models suggest that this is likely to continue, it could be much worse if emissions are not considerably reduced.

“The human body can only function within a narrow range of core body temperatures around 37°C. Heat waves pose a considerable risk to human life because hot weather, aggravated with high humidity, can raise body temperature, leading to life-threatening conditions.”

Dr. Mora and colleagues warned years ago that by 2016 climate would change inexorably in at least some regions of the globe. More recently he and colleagues calculated that the relentless increase in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could limit the growing season and pose a threat to world food security. History has yet to deliver a verdict on either prediction.

Uninhabitable

But the warning about heat waves starts from facts already available. One scientific group has calculated the humidity and temperature hazards and predicted that at least one climate zone—the Gulf between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula—could become murderously hot by the century’s end.

A second study of heat waves over recent decades in India has established a link between extremes of heat, climate change and mass death.

Dr. Mora and colleagues in the U.S. and Britain report in Nature Climate Change that they found evidence on a global scale. They began with 30,000 relevant publications and identified 911 scientific papers with data on 1,949 case studies of cities or regions where deaths were associated with high temperatures.

From this mass of information they found 783 lethal heat waves in 164 cities across 36 countries, with most cases recorded in developed countries at mid-latitudes since 1980: in cities such as New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, London, Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney and São Paulo.

Risk mapped

From this data, they found a common threshold at which temperatures and humidities became lethal: that is, as relative humidity climbed, even lower temperatures could kill. And then they devised a world map of those cities and regions most at risk.

Right now, one human in three lives in a climate zone in which death by extreme heat is or could be possible. The area in which such conditions are liable to happen on at least 20 days a year is predicted to grow.

By 2100 New York could have around 50 days in which conditions could be potentially lethal. In Sydney, Australia the number of such deadly days could be 20, for Los Angeles 30.

For Orlando, Florida, and Houston, Texas, the entire summer could exceed the thresholds at which people have been known to die.

“People are talking about the future when it comes down to climate change, but what we found from this paper is that this is already happening. In fact since 1980 we found close to 2,000 cases of these places and cities when people died from this, and this is obviously going to get a lot worse,” Dr. Mora said.

U.S. walk-out

Notoriously, President Trump has announced that he will withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement of 2015 to contain average global warming to well below 2°C by the century’s end.

The implication of the Hawaiian research is that if nations act in a concerted way to reduce fossil fuel emissions, an estimated 48 percent of the human population could be at risk of summer extremes. And if they do not, this hazard rises to 74 percent.

“Climate change has put humanity on a path that will become increasingly dangerous and difficult to reverse if greenhouse gas emissions are not taken much more seriously,” Dr. Mora said.

“Action like the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is a step in the wrong direction that will inevitably delay fixing a problem for which there is simply no time to waste.”

http://www.alternet.org/environment/forced-endure-extreme-heat-prisoners-are-casualties-texas-climate-denial-documents-show

https://www.ecowatch.com/deadly-heatwaves-climate-change-2444467851.html

http://www.alternet.org/environment/what-would-happen-if-several-worlds-biggest-food-crops-failed-same-time

Less than one-quarter of Earth’s total cropland produces nearly three-quarters of the staple crops that feed the world’s population – especially corn, wheat and rice, the most important cereal crops. These areas are our planet’s major breadbaskets.

Historically, when a crop failed in one of these breadbaskets, only nearby areas had to contend with shortages and rising prices. Now, however, major crops are traded on global markets, which means that production failures can have far-reaching impacts. Moreover, climate change is expected to generate heat waves and drought that could cause crop losses in most of the world’s breadbaskets. Indeed, failures could occur simultaneously in several of these key regions....

[http://www.ecowatch.com/wildfires-drought-southeast-2094301912.html Record-Breaking Drought and Wildfires Plague Southeast] 11/16.

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California’s Drought Policy Serves Corporations First, People Second

California is suffering a historic drought with no relief in sight. According to the latest report from NASA, California has less than a year’s supply of surface water left. In an executive order, Governor Jerry Brown, a self-proclaimed climate leader, imposed a 25% reduction on the state’s local water supply agencies, which serve 90% of California’s residents. Everyday citizens are being asked to cut down on shower times and lawn watering. While these are worthy efforts, they are mere drops in the bucket considering that residential and municipal use of water in CA account for less than 20% of water consumption. Instead of getting at the root of the problem and targeting water-guzzling agribusiness and the oil and gas industry, Governor Brown’s climate policy is pro-corporate, irresponsible and unsustainable.

Despite the growing water crisis, there are no provisions in Brown’s water reduction plan to halt fracking, an extreme method of oil and gas extraction requiring high-pressure injection of millions of gallons of chemical-laced water and sand into deep rock setting free oil or natural gas unavailable through conventional drilling. Last year fracking production in the state used 70 million gallons of water,1 the equivalent of 514 households annually.2 Although proponents of fracking may claim that the combined water use of 514 households is not that high, water used in fracking is highly contaminated and not returned to the annual water cycle, unlike household wastewater.

It was recently learned that California officials allowed oil and gas companies to dump this contaminated water into federally protected aquifers that could have been used for drinking and irrigation purposes.3 Illustrating the corporate control of regulatory agencies, 46 percent of the state permits authorizing these practices were granted in the last four years, the same four years during which the EPA warned California regulators they were not doing enough to protect underground water reserves.

In the Central Valley, many Latina/o farmworkers are struggling for their livelihoods due to years of drought. As a result of last year’s extreme weather, 17,000 farmworker jobs and 400,000 acres of farmland were lost.4 Other Californians are living entirely without running water. In East Porterville, for example, people are turning to costly and environmentally destructive bottled water to meet household needs.5

We can also look at Nestle Corporation’s privatization of our water to further understand how corporate rule is impacting every Californian. In Sacramento, tens of millions of gallons of Sacramento municipal water are being withdrawn by a local Nestle plant. Nestle uses and bottles thousands of acre-feet of California water. An acre-foot, roughly speaking, equals 326,000 gallons, enough to supply a family’s yearly needs.

Nestle and other bottling companies buy water at a pittance and sell it back to the public at exorbitantly high rates. As California’s water disappears, the investment portfolios of some of the nation’s most profitable corporations are being flooded.

In a recent interview Nestle CEO Tim Brown was asked if halting waster extraction was in the company’s plans. Brown responded: “Absolutely not. In fact, if I could increase it, I would. …If I stop bottling water tomorrow, people would buy another brand of bottled water. ...It’s driven by consumer demand, it’s driven by an on-the-go society that needs to hydrate.” 6

Is it possible that CEO Brown never heard of a reusable drinking water bottle?

Out of this Nestle Corporation debacle, the “Crunch Nestle Alliance” formed. The group has singled out Sacramento City Hall, saying Nestle’s privatization was made possible through a “corporate welfare giveaway.” Nestle pays Sacramento $186.00 per 215,000 gallons of water taken from the area aquifers. Those 215,000 gallons bring the Nestle Corporation a whopping $2.1 million in profit.7 The Crunch Nestle Alliance has successfully blockaded a Sacramento Nestle plant several times, raising awareness that water is a human right not a commodity to sell on the open markets.

Notes

1 http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/03/us-california-drought-fracking-exclusive-idUSKBN0MU01M20150403

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/02/fracking-california-water_n_6997324.html

2 http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/04/06/3643184/california-70-million-gallons-fracking/

3 http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2015/02/05/ap-oil-drilling-waste-dumped-into-calif-aquifers-used-for-irrigation-drinking-water/

4 http://fusion.net/story/114463/as-california-goes-dry-latinos-suffer-disproportionately/

5 http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/20/east-porterville-california-drought-bottled-water-showers-toilets

6 "Starbucks Moves Ethos Water from California after Drought-shaming" The Washington Post, May 12, 2015

7 https://criticl.me/post/crunchnestle-alliance-1179

smoking gun?

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/11032016/global-warming-climate-change-extreme-weather-drought-attribution-study

A new study shows it's now possible for scientists to confidently measure the influence of climate change on some extreme weather events, such as heat waves.

In this first-ever assessment of the emerging field of climate science attribution, researchers from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine are setting the record straight on how well scientists can currently tease out the climate-change fingerprints of different types of extreme weather.

In 2015, the United States was hit by myriad extreme weather events: record snowfall in the Northeast; flooding in North Carolina, Texas and Oklahoma; an ongoing drought in California. And America wasn't alone. India experienced a heat wave that killed more than 2,300 people, and the strongest ever tropical cyclone was observed in the Pacific Ocean last year.

Following these events, climate scientists were repeatedly asked the same question by politicians, the public, even the media: Was that event caused by climate change?

"In the past, a typical scientist's response to questions about climate change's role in any given weather event was, 'We cannot attribute any single event to climate change,'" scientists on the National Academies' Committee on Extreme Weather Events and Climate Change wrote in a report published Friday. "The science has advanced to the point that this is no longer true as an unqualified statement."

So when does such a noncommittal answer no longer hold up?

According to the report, scientists have the most confidence in their ability to discern climate change impacts on temperature extremes—whether they are warmer than usual, or not as cold as usual. For these two types of weather events, scientists have a lot of historical data, a strong understanding of how climate change influences the physics of them, and climate models that can accurately replicate past events.

This doesn't mean every heat wave should be assumed to be strongly tied to climate change, clarified J. Marshall Shepherd, a study author and climate researcher at the University of Georgia. Nor does it mean climate change is always influencing extreme weather events in the same way, making them stronger or weaker, more frequent or less frequent, Shepherd told InsideClimate News. It just means that scientists now have the tools to figure out how climate change is impacting notable weather events.

This isn't true for all extreme weather. The study explains that researchers have only moderate confidence in their ability to pin down the link for droughts and extreme rainfall; wildfire is another example of an event that is harder to attribute to climate change, since so many human factors may be involved.

And scientists have even less confidence in their ability to conduct such an analysis for snowstorms, tropical cyclones and extratropical cyclones.

Finally, the report clarified that scientists are currently unable to run such studies for isolated thunderstorms because there's too little data and too many questions about their link to climate change.

Climate Change Is Impacting the Weather. Period.

According to Shepherd, it's time to stop asking whether events are caused by climate change.

"We can essentially lay it to rest, put the tombstone on it," Shepherd said during a press conference following the report's release.

Scientists are in agreement that "climate change is impacting the weather,"Martin Hoerling, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told InsideClimate News.

What's more important—and the focus of this study—is figuring out by how much and in what way climate change is influencing these events, Hoerling said. Specifically, whether climate change influences the frequency and/or the intensity of such events.

The study did not assess the climate influence of any particular event, such as the ongoing drought in California, or grade the findings of past attribution studies.

The 163-page report did review the approaches of attribution studies in the past. Those studies relied primarily on historical data, or on climate models, or some combination of the two. The most reliable studies used both observational data and modeling, the study said.

A key goal of this work is to be able to predict extreme weather events,David Titley, chair of the committee that conducted the study, said at the press conference. "If we could predict them and verify them...it's pretty hard to argue these things aren't happening" or that climate change isn't influencing them, said Titley, director of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at Penn State University.

More important, he said, is how extreme weather prediction can be used for risk assessment. "If we can help people understand how those risks are changing and why those risks are changing, that is a very powerful tool in a toolbox" for city managers, emergency planners and company owners, Titley said.

Sheila V Kumar contributed to this report.

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/the-drought-you-havent-heard-about-is-causing-crisis-in-africa/

south zimbabwe

http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/06/pakistan-heatwave-climate-change/

Pakistan’s lack of preparedness in the face of increasingly intense weather events is being blamed for a growing death toll following what has been one of the most sustained heatwaves in the country since records began.

And weather experts say that the extreme heat—which lasted for much of the second half ofJune, and was felt most in the southern province of Sindh—is linked to climate change.

Fetching water on another scorching hot day in Pakistan’s Sindh province. Photo credit: Vicki Francis/DFID / Wikimedia Commons

Ghulam Rasul, director general of the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD), told Climate News Network that the intense heat was caused by an unusually persistent area of low pressure over the Arabian Sea off Pakistan’s coast.

“Usually, in summer, cool winds blow from the sea to land, and in winter the situation is the opposite,” he said. “This moderates temperatures in the port city of Karachi, but this summer, this didn’t happen.”

Climate Task Force

Pervaiz Amir, formerly a member of a special task force on climate change set up by Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister, said: “The mortality from heatstroke could have been avoided had the Sindh provincial government responded to a heatwave forecast issued by the Pakistan Meteorological Department.”

Karachi, a city of nearly 20 million, was worst hit, with bodies piling up in the city’s morgues, and hospitals crammed with people suffering from severe heatstroke as daytime temperatures climbed to well over 40°C for extended periods.

About 65,000 heatstroke patients were treated at the city’s hospitals, and the death toll in southern Pakistan climbed above 1,200.

Chronic energy shortages—a common occurrence in Pakistan—added to the problem, and the heatwave came during Ramadan, the Muslim fasting period when people do not eat or drink during daylight hours.

Experts say Karachi has also suffered from what’s known as the urban heat island effect, with poor urban planning and a lack of green spaces making conditions even hotter.

Social workers say the majority of those who have died have been the poor and homeless. At one stage, Karachi’s cemeteries ran out of space for burying the dead.

Mohsin Iqbal, a climate scientist at the state-owned Global Change Impact Study Centre in Islamabad, says temperature increases in Pakistan are above the rise in average global temperatures.

Extreme Events

“This is leading to more extreme weather events, with floods and heatwaves becoming more intense and frequent in recent years,” he says.

Climate experts say weather patterns throughout the Asian sub-continent are changing, with more intense periods of heat, delays in the monsoon season and a greater incidence of drought conditions.

In April and May this year, many parts of India were hit by an intense heatwave, causing the death of more than 2,000 people.

AccuWeather, a global forecasting service, says delays in the arrival of monsoon rains and further hot periods are likely to exacerbate drought conditions in Pakistan and northwest India in July and August, threatening crop production across a wide swathe of land.

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Think Today’s Refugee Crisis is Bad? Climate Change Will Make it a Lot Worse

8 Major Cities Running Out of Water

http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/02/cities-running-out-of-water/

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WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO A SINKING CALIFORNIA? JUST ASK SAN LUIS OBISPO

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/what-will-happen-to-a-sinking-california-just-ask-san-luis-obispo/

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/08/bottled-water-california-drought

Bottled-water drinkers, we have a problem: There's a good chance that your water comes from California, a state experiencing the third-driest year on record.

The details of where and how bottling companies get their water are often quite murky, but generally speaking, bottled water falls into two categories. The first is "spring water," or groundwater that's collected, according to the EPA, "at the point where water flows naturally to the earth's surface or from a borehole that taps into the underground source." About 55 percent of bottled water in the United States is spring water, including Crystal Geyser and Arrowhead.

The other 45 percent comes from the municipal water supply, meaning that companies, including Aquafina and Dasani, simply treat tap water—the same stuff that comes out of your faucet at home—and bottle it up. (Weird, right?)

But regardless of whether companies bottle from springs or the tap, lots of them are using water in exactly the areas that need it most right now.

The map above shows the sources of water for four big-name companies that bottle in California. Aquafina and Dasani "sources" are the facilities where tap water is treated and bottled, whereas Crystal Geyser and Arrowhead "sources" refer to the springs themselves.

In the grand scheme of things, the amount of water used for bottling in California is only a tiny fraction of the amount of water used for food and beverage production—plenty of other bottled drinks use California's water, and a whopping 80 percent of the state's water supply goes toward agriculture. But still, the question remains: Why are Americans across the country drinking bottled water from drought-ridden California?

One reason is simply that California happens to be where some bottled water brands have set up shop. "You have to remember this is a 120-year-old brand," said Jane Lazgin, a representative for Arrowhead. "Some of these sources have long, long been associated with the brand." Lazgin acknowledges that, from an environmental perspective, "tap water is always the winner," but says that the company tries to manage its springs sustainably. The water inside the bottle isn't the only water that bottling companies require: Coca-Cola bottling plants, which produce Dasani, use 1.63 liters of water for every liter of beverage produced in California, according to Coca-Cola representative Dora Wong. "Our California facilities continue to seek ways to reduce overall water use," she wrote in an email.

Then there's the aforementioned murkiness of the industry: Companies aren't required to publicly disclose exactly where their sources are or how much water each facility bottles. Peter Gleick, author of Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession With Bottled Water, says, "I don't think people have a clue—no one knows" where their bottled water comes from. (Fun facts he's discovered in his research: Everest water comes from Texas, Glacier Mountain comes from Ohio, and only about a third of Poland Springs water comes from the actual Poland Spring, in Maine.)

A recent *Desert Sun* investigation reported that the Nestle Waters, the company that owns Arrowhead, has been transporting water out of the San Bernadino National Forest using a permit that expired in 1988. The Forest Service hadn't examined the impacts of the bottled water industry on the region. Since the investigation, Forest Service representatives have said that examining the permit is a "priority," and Lazgin wrote that Arrowhead plans to comply with the permit renewal process.

Despite the fact that almost all US tap water is better regulated and monitored than bottled, and despite the hefty environmental footprint of the bottled water industry, perhaps the biggest reason that bottling companies are using water in drought zones is simply because we're still providing a demand for it: In 2012 in the United States alone, the industry produced about 10 billion gallons of bottled water, with sales revenues at $12 billion.

As Gleick wrote, "This industry has very successfully turned a public resource into a private commodity." And consumers—well, we're drinking it up.

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As the West Dries Up, This Hedge Fund Pioneer Stands to Make a Killing

A sneak peek at "Windfall," a smart new book on the business of climate change.

By Michael Mechanic | Thu Jan. 23, 2014 7:00 AM EST

Most writings on climate are tedious or polemical. Windfall [1], journalist McKenzie Funk [2]'s fabulous new book on the business of climate change, is neither. Funk's reporting takes him all over the globe. We meet investors who are buying up land in Africa and water rights in Australia and the American West, and are wagering hundreds of millions of dollars that climate-related drought and food shortages will earn them a fortune.

Funk visits Greenland secessionists who imagine the mineral wealth made accessible by a thawing tundra will bankroll their cause, as well as Israeli snow makers, Dutch seawall developers, geoengineering patent trolls, private firefighters, Big Oil scenario planners, and the scientists deploying mutant mosquitoes [3] against dengue fever—a horrific tropical disease that's crept into Florida of late.

In one particularly surreal chapter, he finds himself in Senegal meeting with African military officials overseeing the first phase of a quixotic 4,700-mile-long foliage barrier against the encroaching Sahara. In short, rather than waste our time on a settled question (duh, it's real!), Funk offers an up-close-and-personal glimpse of climate change's potential winners—and inevitable losers. The book is as fascinating and readable as it is unsettling.

In the excerpt below, a greatly trimmed version of Funk's chapter "Uphill to Money," we meet a fund manager for whom the recent predictions [4] of severe drought in the West can only be good for business. After that, we'll circle back for a chat with the author [5].

****

The following was published by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, a Penguin Random House Company. Copyright McKenzie Funk, 2014.

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Where water Runs when it runs out

The offices of the world's first water-focused hedge fund overlook a parking lot in a subdivided landscape developers call the Golden Triangle. The neighborhood gets its water from the Alvarado Water Treatment Plant, run by San Diego's Public Utilities Department, which gets its water from the San Diego County Water Authority, which gets its water from the larger Los Angeles–dominated Metropolitan Water District, which gets much of its water—in greater proportions during California's droughts—from the 242-mile Colorado River Aqueduct, which gets its water from a reservoir straddling the Arizona border, Lake Havasu, which gets its water from the 1,400-mile Colorado River, which gets its dwindling water from thousands of streams, snowfields, lakes, and springs in a drainage basin covering nearly 250,000 square miles across seven western states. Without imported water, the 2.7-million-person San Diego metropolis, like much of Southern California, would be no more capable of supporting people than the coastal desert it once was. During my visit, at the height of a hot summer in 2010, I got my water one morning from a secretary, who handed me a tiny plastic bottle—Poland Spring, was it?—from the fridge.

"At the risk of being alarmist," Goldman Sachs said in a 2008 report, "we see parallels with Malthusian economics."

:{:{}:

The man I'd come to meet was John Dickerson, the founder and CEO of Summit Global Management, a former CIA analyst, and the buyer of billions of gallons of water in two vital, desiccating river systems: the Colorado and Australia's Murray-Darling. Both systems had recently experienced severe droughts that scientists tied to climate change. Financial managers like Dickerson, meanwhile, had experienced the opposite: a flood of money. Summit had launched its first water fund in 1999, but "for a long time," he told me, "I was a voice in the wilderness. We couldn't get anybody to buy our fund. Then came Al Gore and his stuff, the whole global-warming thing, droughts. Water became the go-to idea."

For the climate investor, water was the obvious thing. Carbon emissions are invisible. But melting ice, empty reservoirs, and torrential rainstorms are tangible—the face of climate change. Water made it real. After An Inconvenient Truth, during 2007's record melt in the Arctic, at least 15 water mutual funds launched globally; in two years, the amount of money under management ballooned tenfold to $13 billion. Credit Suisse, UBS, and Goldman Sachs hired water analysts, the latter calling water "the petroleum of the next century"—"At the risk of being alarmist," Goldman said in a 2008 report, "we see parallels with Malthusian economics."

Dickerson, in his late 60s, sat in a leather chair, and I sat across his desk from him. His bookshelf had three copies of An Inconvenient Truth and two of Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner's seminal 1986 book on water and political power in the American West. "It's the most necessary of all commodities," Dickerson told me. "There's no substitute for it at any price. And we cannot make water. Did you ever think about that, really? Hydrogen and oxygen. You can't grow it."

"I've watched water rights go up and up," Dickerson said, lifting a hand into the air. "Just tick, tick, tick, tick."

Already, global warming was creating shortages as the ratio of saltwater to freshwater increased. "The maldistribution of freshwater is getting much more severe," Dickerson said. The supply/demand imbalance—fueled by population growth, accelerated by carbon emissions—was growing. It was a situation ripe for speculation, except there was no easy way for investors to get in. Summit's first water fund, with $600 million under management, had navigated this roadblock by picking stocks within the $400 billion "hydrocommerce" sector—the business of storing, treating, and delivering water for use in households, manufacturing, and agriculture.

But Dickerson had decided that hydrocommerce wasn't enough. He wanted actual "wet water"—the thing itself. In June 2008, he opened a second hedge fund, the Summit Water Development Group, to amass water rights in Australia and the American West. Already it had attracted hundreds of millions of dollars. "I've watched water rights go up and up," he told me, lifting a hand into the air. "Just tick, tick, tick, tick."

In the eastern United States, Dickerson explained, water could not be stripped from the land and sold as a separate commodity. The courts there followed English common law. "If you have 10 hectares of land, you get x liters from the Thames," he said. "If you have 100 hectares, you get 10 times x from the Thames."

The West was different. The Homestead Acts let pioneers win deeds to federal land if they lived on it for a period and made improvements. In dry years, common law could not stop farmers living upstream from using up all the water before it reached the others, since none of them owned the land. The law became essentially first come, first served. So long as the water was put to "beneficial use," not hoarded, the oldest rights were the most valuable—and they could be freely traded.

Up and down the Colorado River system, Dickerson's fund was buying stakes in private reservoirs, in ditches dug 150 years ago by pioneering ranchers—spending $500,000 here, $1 million there—whose water he hoped to package and sell to suburban boomtowns within the basin.

Most models predicted permanent drought in the Southwest by 2050, with conditions suggesting a new Dust Bowl in the making.

Since the dawn of the new millennium and the onset of the worst Colorado River drought in recent memory, country dwellers had migrated to cities and the rural-to-urban flow of water had doubled. There were now more people to eat food, and fewer to grow it, even as 18 of the 19 major scientific models predicted permanent drought in the Southwest by 2050, with conditions suggesting a new Dust Bowl in the making. The West's fracking boom was putting new strains on the system; according to one study, energy companies controlled more than a quarter of the flow in the upper Colorado basin. In drought-plagued Texas, ranchers and cities already were being priced out of the water market by oil and gas interests. For the Summit Water Development Group, all of this was very good news.

As we said our goodbyes, Dickerson graciously loaded me up with books and reports. On top of the stack was Water for Sale: How Business and the Market Can Resolve the World's Water Crisis, a 2005 book from the Koch brothers-funded Cato Institute. "Some people don't like it," my host conceded. "But this is what's coming."

****

Click here to read our interview [5] with McKenzie Funk.

The April 1 snowpack assessment in California, which set an all-time record for lowest snowpack levels in the state’s history, finally spurred Governor Brown’s office to issue an executive order to residents and non-agricultural businesses to cut water use by 25 percent in the first mandatory statewide reduction in the state’s history.

But some groups have been exempted from the water restrictions, specifically big agriculture, which uses about 80 percent of California’s water, and oil companies. *Democracy Now!* discussed on their show today the new mandates and the implications of exempting some of the biggest water users in the state.

Food & Water Watch California is one of the groups critical of Governor Brown for failing to cap water usage by oil companies and corporate farms, which grow water-intensive crops like almonds and pistachios, most of which are exported out of state or overseas, reports Nermeen Shaikh

of Democracy Now! “In the midst of a severe drought, the governor continues to allow corporate farms and oil interests to deplete and pollute our precious groundwater resources,” says Adam Scow of Food & Water Watch California.

Shaikh and fellow reporter, Amy Goodman, then turn to Mark Hertsgaard, author of a new book, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth,and whose latest story is “How Growers Gamed California’s Drought.” Hertsgaard, an expert on big agriculture and the drought in California, discusses how the price of water is far too low and how we’re still wasting far too much water. “If we priced [water] properly, which means a little bit higher, there’s enormous strides California could be taking with water efficiency,” says Hertsgaard. “We could essentially wipe out the effects of the drought.”

But right now we have billionaire farmers like Stewart Resnick bragging about record profits and record production in water-intensive crops like pistachios, almonds and alfalfa, while poorer communities where farmworkers live “don’t have water coming out of their taps anymore,” says Hertsgaard.

Watch the full clip here:

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Consuming 80 percent of California’s developed water but accounting for only 2 percent of the state’s GDP, agriculture thrives while everyone else is parched.

“I’ve been smiling all the way to the bank,” said pistachio farmer John Dean at a conference hosted this month by Paramount Farms, the mega-operation owned by Stewart Resnick, a Beverly Hills billionaire known for his sprawling agricultural holdings, controversial water dealings, and millions of dollars in campaign contributions to high-powered California politicians including Governor Jerry Brown, former governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis, and U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein.

The record drought now entering its fourth year in California has alarmed the public, left a number of rural communities without drinking water, and triggered calls for mandatory rationing. There’s no relief in sight: The winter rainy season, which was a bust again this year, officially ends on April 15. Nevertheless, some large-scale farmers are enjoying extraordinary profits despite the drought, thanks in part to infusions of what experts call dangerously under-priced water.

esnick, whose legendary marketing flair included hiring Stephen Colbert to star in a 2014 Super Bowl commercial, told the conference that pistachios generated an average net return of $3,519 per acre in 2014, based on a record wholesale price of $3.53 a pound. Almonds, an even “thirstier” crop, averaged $1,431 per acre. Andy Anzaldo, a vice president for Resnick’s company, Wonderful Pistachios, celebrated by showing the assembled growers a clip from the movieJerry Maguire in which Tom Cruise shouts, “Show me the money,” reported theWestern Farm Press, a trade publication. At the end of the day, conference attendees filed out to the sounds of Louis Armstrong singing, “It’s a Wonderful World.”

Agriculture is the heart of California’s worsening water crisis, and the stakes extend far beyond the state’s borders. Not only is California the world’s eighth largest economy, it is an agricultural superpower. It produces roughly half of all the fruits, nuts, and vegetables consumed in the United States—and more than 90 percent of the almonds, tomatoes, strawberries, broccoli and other specialty crops—while exporting vast amounts to China and other overseas customers.

But agriculture consumes a staggering 80 percent of California’s developed water, even as it accounts for only 2 percent of the state’s gross domestic product. Most crops and livestock are produced in the Central Valley, which is, geologically speaking, a desert. The soil is very fertile but crops there can thrive only if massive amounts of irrigation water are applied.

Although no secret, agriculture’s 80 percent share of state water use is rarely mentioned in media discussions of California’s drought. Instead, news coverage concentrates on the drought’s implications for people in cities and suburbs, which is where most journalists and their audiences live. Thus recent headlines warned that state regulators have ordered restaurants to serve water only if customers explicitly request it and directed homeowners to water lawns no more than twice a week. The San Jose Mercury News pointed out that these restrictions

...

During a historic drought, surely the sector that’s responsible for 80 percent of water consumption—agriculture—should be the main focus of public attention and policy.

The other great unmentionable of California’s water crisis is that water is still priced more cheaply than it should be, which encourages over-consumption. “Water in California is still relatively inexpensive,” Heather Cooley, director of the water program at the world-renowned Pacific Institute in Oakland, told The Daily Beast.

One reason is that much of the state’s water is provided by federal and state agencies at prices that taxpayers subsidize. A second factor that encourages waste is the “use it or lose it” feature in California’s arcane system of water rights. Under current rules, if a property owner does not use all the water to which he is legally entitled, he relinquishes his future rights to the unused water, which may then get allocated to the next farmer in line.

awmakers have begun, gingerly, to reform the water system, but experts say that much remains to be done. For years, California was the only state in the arid West that set no limits on how much groundwater a property owner could extract from a private well. Thus nearly everyone and their neighbors in the Central Valley have been drilling deeper and deeper wells in recent years, seeking to offset reductions in state and federal water deliveries. This agricultural version of an arms race not only favors big corporate enterprises over smaller farmers, it threatens to collapse the aquifers whose groundwater is keeping California alive during this drought and will be needed to endure future droughts. (Groundwater supplies about 40 percent of the state’s water in years of normal precipitation but closer to 60 percent in dry years.)

Last fall, the legislature passed and Governor Brown signed a bill to regulate groundwater extraction. But the political touchiness of the issue—agricultural interests lobbied hard against it—resulted in a leisurely implementation timetable. Although communities must complete plans for sustainable water management by 2020, not until 2040 must sustainability actually be achieved. The Central Valley could be a dust bowl by then under current trends.

There are practical solutions to California’s drought, but the lack of realistic water prices and other incentives has slowed their adoption. A shift to more efficient irrigation methods could reduce agricultural water use by 22 percent, an amount equivalent to all the surface water Central Valley farmers lacked because of drought last year, according to an analysis that Cooley of the Pacific Institute co-authored with Robert Wilkinson, a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Kate Poole, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The Brown administration has endorsed better water efficiency—and put a small amount of money where its mouth is. Conservation is the No. 1 priority in the governor’s Water Action Plan, and the drought measures he advanced in 2014 included $10 million to help farmers implement more efficient water management. An additional $10 million was allocated as part of the $1.1 billion drought spending plan Brown and bipartisan legislators unveiled last week. Already more than 50 percent of California’s farmers use drip or micro irrigation, said Steve Lyle, the director of public affairs at the California Department of Food and Agriculture; the new monies will encourage further adoptions.

Meanwhile, underpriced water has enabled continued production of such water-intensive crops as alfalfa, much of which is exported to China. Rice, perhaps the thirstiest of major crops, saw its production area decrease by 25 percent in 2014. But pasture grass, which is used to fatten livestock, and many nut and fruit products have seen their acreage actually increase. Resnick told the Paramount Farms conference that the acreage devoted to pistachios had grown by 118 percent over the last 10 years; for almonds and walnuts the growth rates were 47 and 30 percent, respectively.

One striking aspect of California’s water emergency is how few voices in positions of authority have been willing to state the obvious. To plant increasing amounts of water-intensive crops in a desert would be questionable in the best of times. To continue doing so in the middle of a historic drought, even as scientists warn that climate change will increase the frequency and severity of future droughts, seems nothing less than reckless.

Yet even a politician as gutsy and scientifically informed as Jerry Brown tiptoes around such questions. The Daily Beast asked Brown if in this time of record drought California should begin pricing water more realistically and discouraging water-intensive crops. Responding on the governor’s behalf, spokesman Lyle simply skipped the water pricing question. On crop choices, he cited a reply Brown recently offered to a similar query: “Growing a walnut or an almond takes water, having a new house with a bunch of toilets and showers takes water. So how do we balance use efficiency with the kind of life that people want in California? … We’re all going to have to pull together.”

“California Has One Year of Water Left, Will You Ration Now?” asked the headline of a widely discussed opinion piece NASA scientist Jay Famiglietti published in the Los Angeles Times on March 16. The headline overstated the situation somewhat, and editors soon corrected it to clarify that California has one remaining year of stored water, not one year of total water. As Famiglietti was careful to state, California’s reservoirs today contain enough water to supply a year of average consumption.

So if California endures a fourth year of drought, the only way to keep household taps and farmers’ irrigation lines flowing will be to summon to the surface still greater volumes of groundwater. But that strategy can’t work forever; worse, the longer it is pursued, the bigger the risk that it collapses aquifers, rendering them irretrievably barren. Aquifers can be replenished—if rainwater and snowmelt are allowed to sink into the ground and humans don’t keep raiding the supply—and that is the expressed goal of California’s forthcoming groundwater regulations. The process takes many decades, however, and extended relief from further droughts.

California is caught between the lessons of its history and the habits of its political economy. Droughts of 10 years duration and longer have been a recurring feature in the region for thousands of years, yet a modern capitalist economy values a given commodity only as much as the price of that commodity. Current pricing structures enrich a handful of interests, but they are ushering the state as a whole toward a parched and perilous future.

The price of water, however, is not determined by inalterable market forces; it is primarily a function of government policies and the social forces that shape them. Elected officials may dodge the question for now, but the price of water seems destined to become an unavoidable issue in California politics. “As our water supply gets more variable and scarce in the future, we’re going to have to look at how we price water so it gets used more efficiently,” said Cooley of the Pacific Institute. “In some ways we’ve come a long way in California’s water policy and practices over the past 20 years. But if you look into a future of climate change and continued [economic] development, we can and need to do much better.”

Mark Hertsgaard has reported on politics, culture and the environment from more than 20 countries and has authored six books, including HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, which will appear in paperback April 17

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[http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2014/08/southwests-water-crunch-even-worse-we-thought 40 Million People Depend on the Colorado River. Now It's Drying Up] 8/14.