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A new study published as a joint effort by scientists at Cornell University, the University of Arizona, and the U.S. Geological Survey finds that the chances of the Southwest facing a “megadrought” are much higher than previously suspected.
According to the new study, “the chances of the southwestern United States experiencing a decade-long drought is at least 50 percent, and the chances of a ‘megadrought’ – one that lasts up to 35 years – ranges from 20 to 50 percent over the next century.” Not so crazy, according to Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University who has helped pen many studies of historical megadroughts: “By some measures the west has been in drought since 1998 so we might be approaching a megadrought classification!” he says. The study points to manmade global climate change as a possible cause for the drought, which would affect portions of California (where a drought is currently decimating farms), Arizona and New Mexico.
http://modernfarmer.com/2014/09/scientists-american-southwest-faces-megadrought/
(Score: 4, Insightful) by gallondr00nk on Saturday September 06 2014, @01:54PM
Whenever there's mention of drought in America, it always makes me think of the Owens Valley Lake, drained by Los Angeles to the point where it's so dry that the salt and sediment residue left behind is blown across the entire state. The eventual solution? Pumping water from LA back to the lake in order to keep it wet.
Yet for all the press regarding its unprecedented drought, California still insists on growing things like almonds, despite them needing enormous amounts of water. Perhaps, just maybe, there should be a discussion about why such water intensive agriculture is being carried out in a fucking desert?
I agree that there's a logical failure, where ordinary people are expected to put up with more and more authoritarian water saving measures, while agriculture (by far the largest consumer of water) barely has to do anything.
I can only surmise that either the state of California is being completely won over by lobbying efforts, or that the drought isn't half as severe as the news hysteria machine says it is.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday September 06 2014, @06:06PM
Yet for all the press regarding its unprecedented drought, California still insists on growing things like almonds, despite them needing enormous amounts of water. Perhaps, just maybe, there should be a discussion about why such water intensive agriculture is being carried out in a fucking desert?
In the desert land was cheap and the long growing season makes it an attractive place to do agriculture, as long as there is cheap water available. I think we are screwed long term, as we have allowed over development in areas where farming can be relatively benign from an environmental standpoint. New Jersey for instance, has the nickname "The Garden State", gained because it had good soil, plentiful rain and relatively easy terrain to farm in a large part of the state. Now it has strip malls, condos and housing developments over much of that area and a great deal of high quality, sustainable food producing land has been lost forever. We'll lose the desert too, even if we still had cheap, abundant water, as the soil there tends to become more and more alkaline as it gets watered and efforts to mitigate that become more expensive and more futile as time goes on.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gallondr00nk on Saturday September 06 2014, @09:06PM
I suspect it's time for a conversation over how land and water supplies have changed, and what we need to do differently in the future. As you say, prime arable land has been turned into housing developments, while deserts have been turned over for agriculture. It'll be immensely disruptive and costly, but I suspect that in the long run that land usage will have to be reversed.
Topsoil erosion seems to be becoming an increasingly immediate problem as well. It could be that we also need to do something radical with the soil itself, something like reintroducing the techniques making Terra Preta [wikipedia.org], a rich, dark soil with excellent nutrient content and retention qualities.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 11 2014, @04:42AM
It looks like this terra preta is fundamentally burned garbage. The problem for that nowadays is since garbage is largely plastics, you need to burn something else. Tho I imagine 'cleaned' garbage could be bricked up and used.
I saw a study over 20 years ago that claimed over half the best farmland in the U.S. had already been built over. Once it's gone, what do they expect to eat?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.