Climate-Driven Megadrought Is Emerging in Western U.S., Says Study

I'd love to see more innovation in farming practices. I'm a huge fan of aquaponics. Uses around 10% of the water of current farming techniques. I've got my own setup in my backyard. Right now I'm working on getting it started, but I'm planning on experimenting with growing wheat, and if I ever get a large enough system, I want to try growing trees, like almonds, which are traditionally pretty water intensive. These aren't generally worth growing at a small scale, but I figure if it can be done then maybe it could scale up. I really want to try making a combine harvester for wheat that runs on rails along the aquaponics grow beds to help in the automation.

> The crazy thing is, despite all the drought, most of our land is engineered to “ditch” water — get it off the land as quickly as possible.

Which land are you talking about? In western Kansas, fields are terraced and capture rainwater to soak into the ground water table. Since they've done the terracing, gully-washers have been non-existent and most of the time streams are dry.

what's in his later chapters?

Are these repurposed oil pipelines? Or dedicated fresh water pipelines built specifically to replenish water supplies?

I'd imagine as oil declines, the pipelines from the gulf might be able to send desalinated water back inland.

Not sure how feasible this would be, thoughts?

From the other end of the equation, if the aquifer is primarily surface fed and does not receive input from rainfall, the aquifer will drop regardless of the withdraw rate.

Drought is definitely not a variety of climate. Drought is a shortage of water supply, which can be caused by climate, or, for instance, a change in the flow of a river.

Drought is a variety of weather. Climate change makes drought more common in some areas.

Episodic or seasonal droughts; nthe El Niño Southern Oscillation / La Niña Pacific Ocean cycle,[1] the Indian Ocean Dipole,[2], changes in weather due to vulcanism,[3] or more cataclysmically, asteroid impacts,[4], seasonal wet-dry cycles such as monsoons,[5] predictable megacycles such as the precession of Earth's apses (Milankovitch cycles),[6] and even large-scale changes in vegitation -- growth or decline of forests and wetlands can affect both micro- and regional weather as well as global weather patterns.[7]

Other possible factors are changes in ocean behaviours (especially currents) which themselves may be driven by other climate-related changes, or by changes to seabed (landslides, vulcanism), or joining or parting of landmasses (tectonics, sea level change). Changes in terrestrial hydrological patterns: mountain formation (usually geologically slow, sometimes not), changes to river courses, formation and draining of inland seas and lakes, ice-dam formation and flooding (eastern Washington's badlands are a stunning example).

It's complicated.

________________________________

Notes:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Niño

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_Dipole

3. https://scied.ucar.edu/shortcontent/how-volcanoes-influence-...

4. http://ehso.com/climatechange/climatechangecauses-meteorites...

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon

6. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2948/milankovitch-orbital-cycl...

7. https://globalforestatlas.yale.edu/climate-change/climate-ch... touches on this. One theory is that the decline in Native American populations following European contact, and epidemic disease, lead to a growth in forests in North America, with a resulting decrease in global atmospheric CO2.

Sounds like you basically got there yourself in your last paragraph, but I think a term that might lead you down some fruitful reading is "motivated reasoning." It's often about maintaining some other desirable property (e.g. being accepted by their community; keeping a particular friend group; holding a belief system), and rationality takes a backseat to maintaining that property.

This one can be quite complicated, but I wonder how much of it is actually related to the quote that goes something like “science progresses one death at a time”. Which is talking about a bigger problem in science, which is that tenured scientists have either too much invested in their careers or too much vested in their models to allow the spread of upstart scientists’ ideas. There’s often a generational aspect (though don’t confuse this with age, since someone new to a field at 70 would be a younger generation) where newer scientists pick up on some thing that older scientists ignored and they start spreading it’s importance, then 20 years later, once the last of the old guard leave the field, it’s no longer downplayed and science can ‘advance’ (there is some risk that said thing wasn’t actually important, but for hard sciences data tends to trump all else).

So then the question to your question becomes more, are these contrarians representative of some new wave? As a trained economist, I’ve been trained to be skeptical of entrenched establishments, usually people will fail to believe that which threatens their paychecks. So the other question is, are there big incentives to encourage the established field to continue believing what it believes?

I will say there are a lot of crackpots out there, and novices tend to be wrong a lot, so the way science is currently done isn’t such a bad thing. But it would be wise to at least listen occasionally to cross discipline contrarians. They will often bring up arguments that are strong from their primary field, without being weighed down with baggage from the other field. You get an occasional Eli Whitney, or if you’re really lucky a John Nash.

One last thought. Hard sciences are hard for a reason, reality keeps them in check. And experiments allow for falsifiable hypotheses. There are a lot of sciences that rely primarily on observation, with little to no experimentation. This makes falsifiability tricky. This also means you’re going to see more general dissent associated with these fields (and if you don’t see it within the field that might be a red flag).

Sounds like the opposite of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

It’s expected to change the distribution of precipitation.

It's a loaded term really. Global warming is umbrella term for 'Extreme Weather Conditions'.

You get mega droughts followed by mega flooding (depending on region).

Those are tied to global increase in mean temperature.

This information is available if you go look for it. Start at the latest IPCC reports and branch out from there. It's a very large topic, your summary of the "sides" is wildly uninformed.

> other side saying there is a problem and the only solution is X (which is a tragedy of the commons type solution).

You may want to broaden your sources, I can't imagine how you got the impression of "only solution is X."

There are all sorts of mitigation plans, all sorts of energy transition plans. Nobody know what will work in the end, what new unforeseen technologies will be developed, and how the costs will change as industry scales technologies, so there's a huge variety.

If your X == "stop emitting greenhouse gasses," well, there's tons of ways to do that. Many of which will massively increase economic productivity.

There are occasional large reports that spell out various routes to stop emitting GHG. There are resources like Project Drawdown that investigate these potential of a hundred different climate interventions. There are focused news media like GreenTech Media that focus on technology interventions. There are an abundance of governmental reports on ways to meet our climate goals, on all sorts of particulars, for example I was reading a great one last night about electricity of buildings in California or using renewable natural gas [1].

There's soooo many books, forums, advocacy groups, policy wonks, podcasts, news outlets, etc. focused on exploring what you say you want to hear. So many that it's hard to even suggest a starting point. Imagine if somebody said "I'd be interested in hearing more about computers and the internet," how would you start pointing them to the general resources for something so broad?

[1] https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/2019publications/CEC-500-2019-055/...

Overpopulation: who can understand it?

I was at Mesa Verde a decade ago and asked the Park Service person explaining the cliff dwellings what the ancient population of the Southwest was.

One estimate, I was told, put it at 30k.

I don't know why this comment is dead. It's an interesting idea.

Cloud seeding exists already. It works by distributing particles (I forget what of) in the air that water can coalesce around into clouds and then raindrops.

There are ethical and geo/political consequences though, since doing it is effectively stealing rain from another area.

I'd guess that it's more efficient to desalinate water and distribute it via pipelines than to go the extra step of getting it up to cloud height and then letting it fall down again.

Ultrasonic foggers would also increase the amount of salt in the air, so you’d have to run them far out in the sea.

Instead, flood Death Valley with ocean water:

1. Massive evaporative potential. 2. Moisture trapped by tall mountains replenishing the aquifer and making lush surroundings. 3. Massive hydro potential 4. Displaced species not seriously harmed since the moisture gradient would be large (are P. 2) 5. You could harvest the salt prolonging the suitability of the project (anyway measured in centuries if not millennia)

Basically you’d have the lushness of the surroundings of Salt Lake City (compared to the desert anyway). Except there would be a lot more moisture (lower salinity wrt it Salt Lake, moisture better trapped)

You could do the same thing in Egypt at the Qatara depression, except with potentially global benefits. Here the half of the Sahara could be turned into productive farm land.

I don't think it's that special. When there are large benefits to humans and no apparent downsides, humans will pollute as much as Earth capacity allows. Just like any other organism before.

Just for a second, try and imagine what world you would be living in without fossil fuels in the last 200 years. Would you have the computer or phone to write on? Would you have the internet to connect? Your house? Your food?

That's not to say it's not a good idea to change this, and to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. But to say this period was a period of human ignorance and "doped up"-ness is an extremely naive reading of human history.

I would be careful about blaming "human ignorance" because, case in point, a great many of us are aware of the climate crisis and feel the need to do something about it. In the US, for example, most of the component policies of the Green New Deal poll quite well across party lines.

The problem is that the climate crisis demands large-scale collective planning and decision making, and our systems for doing so have been completely co-opted by powerful economic entities. The actions available to the average citizen amount to putting aside everything in one's life to become an activist (which most people don't have the luxury to do), occasionally voting from a menu of pre-selected corporate-backed candidates, or making ultimately insignificant lifestyle changes (and even that has been subverted by economic powers through "eco-friendly" consumer products).

It's always helpful to look at a problem through the lens of power relationships before blaming "people" for being stupid or ignorant. Certainly some people are, but that doesn't mean it would solve the problem if they weren't.

There's a take on I, Pencil but with a computer. I'm not sufficiently motivated to look for it, but it's out there somewhere, and was enjoyable.

I understand your sense of grievance, and often share it at an emotional level.

But what makes you think it would ever have been different? Any creature which evolved the behavioural flexibility to outrun curbs on its pullulation would eventually overtax its environment. It just so happens that human spread has been so extensive that our environment is the whole globe. It is only natural, in the strictest sense, that we will damage it, probably to the point of making it inhospitable to us (at least in current numbers & consumption levels). To think that we (merely a bright hominid, evolved for small-group social interactions) might transcend our biology to manage an entire planet is, well, wishful thinking at best.

It was a pleasant fantasy, with religious origins. That's all.

If the cure is worse than the illness, why take the cure? Who are you going to save the planet for? I don't particularly mind humanity ending a few years after I've died of old age.

I'm a small c conservative, and as part of this I care about the environment, and from my perspective there are a number of ways that the environmental movement don't do themselves any favours. Firstly there are those amongst them that come across far too preachy, in a way that can be a turn-off. Nobody constantly wants to hear bad news and moralising and be told they are personally responsible for all these problems, when most are just trying to get by in a system they didn't create, and have little real influence over. Secondly some of them oppose even the suggestion of technical solutions, preferring instead to emphasise that a kind of hair-shirt existence of drastically poorer lifestyles is all we have the right to expect, as if we've committed some kind of moral crime and only penance will suffice. Thirdly and related to both of the first two points, some (most?) of them are tightly bound to leftist political movements - sometimes tending to the extreme - which both immediately alienates people like me, and makes me suspicious that they are merely using the green movement as a vehicle for ulterior concerns, and indeed some of them are actually completely open about this:

'I’m here to say that XR isn’t about the climate. You see, the climate’s breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system of that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life. This was exacerbated when European ‘civilisation’ was spread around the globe through cruelty and violence (especially) over the last 600 years of colonialism, although the roots of the infections go much further back.'

https://medium.com/extinction-rebellion/extinction-rebellion...

'Greta Thunberg: Climate crisis "not just about environment," but also "colonial, racist, patriarchal systems of oppression"'

https://disrn.com/news/greta-thunberg-climate-crisis-not-jus...

I could go on to point out the myriad inconsistencies in the positions of these groups e.g. pro-environment/pro-migration, pro-environment/anti population control, but I'll leave it there. If I think about it for too long it makes me angry because I think these groups are doing more harm than good, and I question whether they really care about the environment at all.

How can we assume that the proposed solutions or diagnosis of the problem can escape the trap of 'human ignorance'?

Human nature is largely static. The fallibility of man is a constant.

I don't like seeing the kind of belligerent ignorance you're peddling going unchallenged.

The claim, in the first paragraph of the article, is:

"a megadrought as bad or worse than anything even from known prehistory is very likely in progress"

Note it is "very likely". This is not the same as being certain. Note the drought has already started (quoting Science Mag: "the period from 2000 to 2018 was the driest 19-year span since the late 1500s and the second driest since 800 CE").

As for the CA drought ending, the state is currently 35% in drought (https://www.drought.gov/drought/states/california). The rain that ended the drought seems like it was fairly inconsequential against the long term trend.

“CA drought would end”

In my area we are at 50% of average this year.

Perhaps they simply can't make accurate predictions. The rest of their behavior can be easily explained in terms of self interest. While this may be overly cynical, I think it is worth keeping Occam's razor handy.