Drought

Editor’s Note; The fossil fuel industry is largely responsible for the climate crisis we are in today. The following article highlights the current state of the climate crisis. While we believe that the fossil fuel industry needs to be stopped, DGR does not believe that “green” energy is going to save the planet. We believe that the green energy industry is just an extension of the ’traditional" energy industry, running with the same disregard for the natural world. This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute. ...

All around the world, irrigation for agriculture is taking massive amounts of water from rivers, in many cases leaving them almost or entirely dry. This article comes from central Oregon, where 90% of human water use is for agriculture. Low Flows Due to Irrigation Destroying Deschutes River by George Wuerthner / The Wildlife News The recent article “ Low Flows On Deschutes” highlights why irrigation is a significant threat to our river’s ecological integrity. ...

Forests hold the climate together. They are also at extreme risk due to global warming, drought, and other ecological stresses created by industrial civilization. New research shows that forests may be “hanging by a thread.” This excerpt from a recent peer-reviewed article in Science magazine details some of the threats to forests. Despite the academic language, it paints a frightening picture of the near future. The article can be read in its entirety here. ...

By Max Wilbert Heat that was once unthinkable is now becoming commonplace. In the three decades I have been observing weather in my native Pacific Northwest, heat that used to come once a decade now comes every year. Most people I speak with have the same experience. As usual, climate science lags behind observations. According to a new paper, unprecedented and massive heat waves (similar to those that afflicted the northern hemisphere in May—July 2018) will occur every year at 2º C global warming. ...

by Dahr Jamail / Truthout - reprinted with permission / Image: NSIDC I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it. I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song? — Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours ...

Featured image: Lake Powell, photographed April 12, 2017. The white ‘bathtub ring’ at the cliff base indicates how much higher the lake reached at its peak, nearly 100 feet above the current level. Patti Weeks by Brad Udall, Colorado State University and Jonathan Overpeck, University of Arizona / The Conversation The nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead on the Arizona/Nevada border and Lake Powell on the Arizona/Utah border, were brim full in the year 2000. Four short years later, they had lost enough water to supply California its legally apportioned share of Colorado River water for more than five years. Now, 17 years later, they still have not recovered. ...

Searchable BLM reports and satellite images for 20,000 grazing allotments By Tay Wiles / High Country News Featured image: The map includes blue-tinted areas that represent Greater sage grouse habitat, underneath the tens of thousands of tinted grazing allotments. Image by High Country News. When the Bureau of Land Management ordered the removal of cattle from public rangeland this summer near Battle Mountain, Nevada, the state was in its third year of severe drought. Conditions were too dry to sustain the number of cattle that were grazing there, the BLM contended. Locals responded in part by announcing a “ Cowboy Express” ride from Bodega Bay, California to Washington, DC to protest federal overreach and to demand that local District Manager Doug Furtado be ousted. ...

By NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory An area of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of California continues to suffer from the effects of a megadrought that began in 2005, finds a new NASA-led study. These results, together with observed recurrences of droughts every few years and associated damage to the forests in southern and western Amazonia in the past decade, suggest these rainforests may be showing the first signs of potential large-scale degradation due to climate change. ...

By Justin Gillis / The New York Times The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the corn belt and a massive storm that caused broad devastation in the mid-Atlantic states, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States. How hot was it? The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but last year blew away the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit. ...

By Mongabay Already facing an onslaught of threats from logging and conversion for agriculture, forests worldwide are increasingly impacted by the effects of climate change, including drought, heightened fire risk, and disease, putting the ecological services they afford in jeopardy, warns a new paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The study, authored by William Anderegg of Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University and Jeffrey Kane and Leander Anderegg of Northern Arizona University, reviews dozens of scientific papers dealing with the ecological impacts of climate change. They find widespread cases of forest die-off from drought and elevated temperatures, which can increase the incidence of fire and pest infestations like pine beetles. These effects have the potential to trigger transitions to other ecosystems, including scrubland and savanna. But the impacts vary from forest to forest and the authors say more research is needed to fully understand the effects of climate change on forest ecosystems. ...