East Africa is being hit with the worst drought in 60 years, with rainfall less than 30 percent of normal in many areas. In Ethiopia, Kenya, and especially Somalia, widespread crop failure and livestock death have left millions of people on the brink of starvation. In Somalia alone, about 30,000 children under the age of 5 have died. Almost a million more Somalis have fled into overwhelmed refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. In the podcast, Chris Funk, a climatologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, fingers one of the key culprits for the drought: climate change. Funk ... Read More
Greening the Desert? Not So Fast!
May 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
When Marc Reisner published his groundbreaking — and self-proclaimed apocalyptic — analysis of the West’s water woes in 1986, geographic information systems were in their infancy and climate forecasting models could take months to run. Not that Reisner’s predictions in Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water were without merit. Indeed, his concerns that water shortages would pit urban population growth against food production are fast becoming a reality. At the time of publication, Reisner’s text wasn’t viewed as a scientific piece of work, but it did make ... Read More
The Dust Bowl: Lessons from the Greatest U.S. Environmental Disaster
December 17, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The Dust Bowl of the 1930's was one of the major reasons that the Great Depression inflicted such an incredible toll of misery in the United States. All across the Midwest, a brutal seven-year drought caused farms to literally dry up and blow away. Giant wind storms blew hundreds of millions of tons of soil across the country, devastating farms and creating millions of refugees in their wake. The conventional wisdom has been that the drought was a natural disaster, but new evidence by Dr. Benjamin Cook shows that the drought's unprecedented severity was a result of widespread poor planting ... Read More
Drought-Proofing California by 2020
July 29, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
California lawmakers are working on a historic plan — the first of its kind in the United States — to require a 20 percent reduction in per-capita urban water use by the year 2020. It signals the end of cheap water for water wasters, a change that's bound to come as a shock to some residents in the Golden State. This spring, more than 2,000 people living in and around the populous High Desert community of Palmdale — 60 miles north of Los Angeles — wrote letters of protest after their water district, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, dramatically raised hikes in rates and service ... Read More
Working Around Salty Residue in Nation’s Breadbasket
August 25, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
While California’s farmers grapple with a record-setting drought, an ancient enemy lurks beneath a layer of topsoil in an area that’s been dubbed “the most productive unnatural environment on Earth.” Just below the surface of 2.5 million acres of California’s most fertile and productive farmlands lie pockets of residual brine. Perched, shallow groundwater infused with boron, sodium sulfate, selenium and other minerals common to seawater points to the submarine origins of the state’s fertile Central Valley, which by dollar value produces as much as a quarter of the nation’s ... Read More
The Next Market Crunch: Water
July 14, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
It’s common practice to use business or banking metaphors when discussing the human use of water; in both cases, the central idea is to exert control, to manage. In its natural state, after all, water tends to be as unpredictable as booms and busts. It arrives as rain or snow, melts, runs into streams or seeps into the ground, floods, evaporates. Through enormous effort and expense, people have been able to corral that irregularity into something that can be relied on, mostly. You assume that your kitchen faucet will run whether or not it has rained recently, just as you expect you can tap ... Read More
