Posted on October
15, 2016 by Yves
Smith
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By Gaius
Publius, a professional writer living on the West Coast of the United
States and frequent contributor to DownWithTyranny, digby, Truthout, and Naked
Capitalism. Follow him on Twitter @Gaius_Publius, Tumblr and Facebook.
Originally published at at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.
Originally published at DownWithTyranny
I’ve written in the past about
two of the most climate-vulnerable regions of the U.S., Florida and the
American Southwest. (A third region, the Pacific Northwest, is vulnerable, but
to a non-climate event, a magnitude 9.0 mega-earthquake.) Here I want to look again
to the problems of California and the Southwest.
Much of the water that
sustains California, southern Nevada, Arizona, and surrounding areas comes from
the ever-drying Colorado River.
Just as it’s now clear that
we’ve passed the tipping point for extreme weather, we’re also
very likely passed the tipping point for the long-term habitability of the
American Southwest.
The report is from NASA;
the write-up is from EcoWatch (my emphasis):
NASA: Megadrought Lasting
Decades Is 99% Certain in American Southwest
A study released in Science
Advances Wednesday finds strong evidence for severe, long-term droughts afflicting the American Southwest, driven
by climate
change. A megadrought lasting decades is 99 percent certain to
hit the region this century, said scientists from Cornell University, the
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and the NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies.
“Historically, megadroughts
were extremely rare phenomena occurring only once or twice per millennium,” the
report states.
“According to our analysis of
modeled responses to increased GHGs, these events could become commonplace if
climate change goes unabated.”
Rising temperatures will combine with decreased
rainfall in the Southwest to create droughts that will be worse than the
historic “Dust
Bowl” of the 20th century and last far longer. The Dust Bowl lasted no
longer than eight years, and affected 100 million acres around the Texas
and Oklahoma panhandles and adjacent lands in Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico.
Dust storms swept through large swaths of former farmland, depositing dust as
far east as Chicago, New York and Washington. It is estimated that more
than half a million people were made homeless, and some 3.5 million Dust Bowl
refugees migrated west, in hopes of finding work.
Just a few thoughts.
First, a megadrought lasting
decades is a once- or twice-in-a-millennium event. That’s once every 500 to
1000 years. The American Southeast had two “once in 500 year” storms in the last two years, and that
following “Superstorm Sandy” in 2012. Obviously the frequency is
changing, perhaps exponentially.
In the Southwest that
megadrought could last for the next few decades. I did a major piece here — “California Drought, the “Bigger Water Crisis” & the
Consumer Economy” — with a breakdown of elements that went into the current
multi-year drought, and a look at the Colorado River basin and its condition.
Some of the bottom lines include these:
The social
contract will break in California and the rest of the Southwest (and don’t
forget Mexico, which also has water rights from the Colorado and a reason to
contest them). This will occur even if the fastest, man-on-the-moon–style
conversion to renewables is attempted starting tomorrow.
This means, the very very
rich will take the best for themselves and leave the rest of us to
marinate in the consequences — to hang, in other words. (For a French-Saudi
example of that, read this. Typical “the rich are always entitled”
behavior.) This means war between the industries, regions, classes. The rich
didn’t get where they are, don’t stay where they are, by surrender.
Government will
have to decide between the wealthy and the citizenry. How do you expect that to
go?
Government
dithering and the increase in social conflict will delay real solutions
until a wake-up moment. Then the real market will kick in — the market for
agricultural land and the market for urban property. Both will start to decline
in absolute value.
If there’s a mass awareness
moment when all of a sudden people in and out of the Southwest “get it,”
those markets will collapse. Hedge funds will sell their interests in
California agriculture as bad investments; urban populations will level, then
shrink; the fountains in Las Vegas and the golf courses in Scottsdale will go
brown and dry, collapsing those populations and economies as well.
Second, about the time frame,
obviously there’s a possibility of a once-in-500-year multi-seasonal rainfall,
but that’s not expected, to say the least. Will the region recover from this
drought? If it lasts two decades, I think its livability, its habitability is finished.
And when people figure that out, they’ll move, perhaps in droves, depending on
whether something triggers panic-selling.
That is, the area will be
livable, but by a lifestyle without modern infrastructure, since it takes a
certain critical mass of population and wealth (economic activity) to keep
modern infrastructure going. Think of the infrastructure in small towns, where
people are leaving and populations are declining, versus the more viable
lifestyle available to vigorous larger towns and cities, where there are jobs.
Now add multi-decade drought to those small-town lives.
Where will the jobs be if Los
Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and Las Vegas have no water? Where will California
agriculture be if farms go dry? And finally, consider the Dust Bowl again. As
many as 3.5 million refugees migrated west, to California. Where will
those refugees go if they’re forced to leave California, the heart of the dry
zone and pressed against the ocean? Utah? Unlikely. North perhaps, swamping the
Pacific Northwest with people, or given a slower migration, back across the
Rockies.
Civilizations have risen and
died in the American Southwest. During the last megadrought, the Anasazi, or
Pueblo culture, which was extensive in territory, completely disappeared. When
the Mormons arrived in Utah, the Anasazi were identifiable only by their
relics. EcoWatch again:
Megadroughts of 35 years are
currently rare and have led to severe upheaval in the past. There’s evidence
that the Pueblo people of what is now the south-west US were forced to abandon
settlements in the 13th century due to a lengthy drought.
For the U.S. to compress and
recede to a more habitable center while aggressively converting to zero-carbon
is not the worst outcome in the world. Far from it, in fact.
There Is a Solution — A Zero
Carbon Economy
I’ve been writing for a few
years that there is likely a five-to-ten year window, and only that, in which
we could start a crash program toward a zero-carbon economy, what I like to
call the Stop Now plan, and what others call a WWII-style mobilization or “man
on the moon”-style program. That’s actually good news — that there’s still time
— and I still believe it.
If we start in the first term
of the next president, we can mitigate most of the disaster nationally, though
maybe not all of it regionally.
From the Guardian’s report of the same NASA study:
The new report does proffer a
crumb of hope – if greenhouse gas emissions are radically cut then the risk of
megadrought will reduce by half, giving a roughly 50:50 chance that a
multi-decade stretch of below-average rainfall would occur this century.
But the research found that
the emissions cuts would have to be far steeper than those agreed to by nations in Paris last year, where a 2C limit
on warming was pledged.
“We would need a much more
aggressive approach than proposed at Paris, it’s not too late to do this but
the train is leaving the station as we speak,” [Toby Ault, a scientist at
Cornell University and lead author of the study,] said.
And one last point. The next
president will be the last one with a clear chance to turn the ship. It looks
like Hillary Clinton, barring the unforeseen, will be that president. She
recently gave a very aggressive climate speech, with Al Gore at her side.
Can she be brought to see, not just the extremity of the situation, but the
extremity of the actions needed to address it? The jury is out on that, and
that’s also the good news.
As long as there’s time on the
clock, there’s hope. I don’t expect you or I will influence this election; the
country is too far down that road, and perhaps not all the influential wild
cards have been played. But we can influence the winner afterward, so long as
that winner has a modicum of sense and so long as the evidence — megastorms,
megadroughts — is incontrovertibly in front of her.
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