Tag: drought

Europe has now entered its worst drought in 500 years

– August 28, 2022

Europe is facing its worst drought in 500 years, with two-thirds of the continent under a “warning” or “alert,” a study by the European Commission has discovered.

Preliminary data from the European Drought Observatory found that 47% of Europe is under warning conditions, meaning the soil has a clear deficit of moisture. An additional 17% of the continent is in a state of alert, meaning vegetation is under stress.

Across Europe, hot, dry conditions have threatened livestock and increased crop failure. According to the report, grain yields are expected to fall 16% below the average for the past five years. Forecasts for soybean and sunflower yields are also set to fall by 15% and 12%, respectively.

“The severe drought affecting many regions of Europe since the beginning of the year has been further expanding and worsening as of early August,” the report said.

Countries along Europe’s Mediterranean coast, such as Italy, France, and Spain, are likely to see warmer and drier conditions until November. Mariya Gabriel, research commissioner for the European Union, said the ongoing heat waves and water shortages have created “unprecedented stress on water levels in the entire EU.”

Gabriel added: “We are currently noticing a wildfire season sensibly above the average and an important impact on crop production. Climate change is undoubtedly more noticeable every year.” The report also warned that most of Europe’s rivers have seen a drop in water level, with riverbeds in Germany and France drying up.

Sections of Germany’s River Rhine have completely dried up, disrupting shipping in the country’s most important inland waterway. German officials told CNN on Aug. 12 that levels of water in the river had fallen “exceptionally low.”

Receding water levels have uncovered artifacts from below the depths, including shipwrecks, world war relics and “hunger stones” — rocks placed throughout the centuries to mark water levels during historic droughts — inscribed with warnings to future generations. (Yahoo News)

https://endtimeheadlines.org

Drought Impacts Both The Food and Energy Supply

– August 17, 2022

Low water levels in the Western states are causing a problematic crop yield. But they also impact our energy supply and push the power grid to the brink.

When temperatures rise and water levels drop, the energy sector gets squeezed hard. The consequences of water shortages are playing out now in swaths of the American West, where an expansive, decades-long drought is forcing drastic cuts in hydroelectric power generation. At the same time, exceptional heat has pushed energy demand to record highs.

According to a report by Vox, the flow of water is critical to the flow of electrons and heat. About 40 percent of water withdrawals — water taken out of groundwater or surface sources — in the United States go toward energy production. The large majority of that share is used to cool power plants. In turn, it requires energy to extract, purify, transport, and deliver water.

The United Nations Environment Programme warned this month that if drought conditions persist, the two largest hydroelectric reservoirs in the US — Lake Mead and Lake Powell —could eventually reach “dead pool status,” where water levels fall too low to flow downstream. Lake Mead fuels the Hoover Dam, which has a power capacity topping 2,000 megawatts while Lake Powell drives generators that peak at 1,300 megawatts at the Glen Canyon Dam.

This is all going to compound into a major problem that we are all going to be facing in the coming months, as the cold weather approaches.

“Water supplies for agriculture, fisheries, ecosystems, industry, cities, and energy are no longer stable given anthropogenic climate change,” Camille Calimlim Touton, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, told Congress in June.

Almost all crops are under a threat of a horrifically low yield. A lack of water and extreme heat is making farming incredibly difficult, if not impossible.

https://www.shtfplan.com

Horrifying drought causing widespread crop failures throughout the United States and Europe

ETH – Aug 11, 2022

(OPINION) We really are reaching a major crisis point. Thanks to soaring fertilizer prices, insane weather patterns, and the war in Ukraine, global food supplies have been getting tighter and tighter. So we really needed a banner year for agricultural production in both the United States and Europe in 2022, and that is not going to happen.

In fact, unprecedented drought is absolutely devastating crops all over the northern hemisphere. A lot of people are complaining about how high food prices are right now but just wait. If some sort of a miracle doesn’t happen, agricultural production is going to be way below expectations in both the United States and Europe, and that is going to have very serious implications for 2023.

Let me start by talking about the nightmare that is starting to unfold in Europe. According to CNN, it is now being projected that farmers in Italy have lost “up to 80% of their harvest” because the drought has become so severe… In Italy, farmers in some parts of the country have lost up to 80% of their harvest this year due to severe weather anomalies, the Coldretti farming association said Thursday.

How are those farmers going to survive? Many farmers in France are facing similar losses because they have only been receiving a fraction of the rainfall that they normally get… In France, where an intense drought has hammered farmers and prompted widespread limits on freshwater use, there were just 9.7 millimeters (0.38 inches) of rain last month, Meteo France said.

That was 84 percent down on the average levels seen for July between 1991 and 2022, making it the driest month since March 1961, the agency added. Crop failures in France would be a really, really big deal because France is normally “the fourth-largest exporter of wheat” in the entire world…

France is the fourth-largest exporter of wheat and among the top five exporters of maize globally. Poor harvests due to drought may heap further pressure on grain supplies after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused global shockwaves. The situation in Germany is also extremely dire.

https://endtimeheadlines.org

Meteorologists Warn ‘Megadrought’ in US Southwest is Worst in 1,200 Years

Sputnik – May 12, 2022

A new study has found that the 22-year-long water shortage plaguing the American Southwest and western Mexico is the region’s worst in more than a millennium – a phenomenon dubbed a “megadrought.”

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, found that soil moisture deprivation has exceeded that of a megadrought in the 16th century that was previously the region’s worst known drought.

It’s so bad that University of California Los Angeles geographer Park Williams, the study’s lead author, has warned it would take a prolonged shift in weather patterns to remedy things.

The researchers looked at tree rings to compare the present drought’s intensity with those of years past, since trees generally produce wider rings in wet years and narrower rings in drier years. They found that since 2000, the average soil moisture deficit was twice that of any drought of the past century, with nothing comparable being found until 1,200 years back.

The region has always been quite dry, of course, with four large deserts dominating the terrain and the rest being fairly arid. Indigenous civilization was well-adapted to the precarious conditions, but modern cities have been built without respect to climate – and may soon suffer the consequences.

Reservoirs created by hydroelectric dams, like the famous Hoover Dam outside Las Vegas, Nevada, that holds back Lake Mead, are reaching historic lows. The lake provides the City That Never Sleeps with its freshwater, but has suffered steady water loss since 1983, which has accelerated in recent years, requiring modifications to Hoover Dam’s turbines to allow it to continue producing electricity despite the low water level.

https://sputniknews.com

Montana in grip of 4th driest year on record: Big Sky Country farmers, ranchers and towns struggle under extreme drought

Strange Sounds – December 22, 2021

There’s an old weather adage that’s been passed over cups of coffee and glasses of beer for nearly a century: “It’s not a drought ’til it breaks your heart.”

Today, the hearts of thousands of Montanans have broken across the bare back of one of one of the worst droughts in Montana history: farmers trying to balance their books after a paltry harvest, stockmen paying too much to feed already skinny cattle, outfitters and fishermen prevented from landing a fish because the streams were either too warm or too dry, conservationists and recreationists of all types who watched Montana’s forests burn and its prairies shrivel.

On Dec. 15, 2021, every county in Montana was identified as experiencing some level of drought, with a third of the state is in the grips of a “D4” or “exceptional” drought, a designation the U.S. Department of Agriculture expects to occur in any one location just once every 50 to 100 years. The entire state is, on average, 4.66 inches behind in annual precipitation. The only years that have been drier were 1931, 1919 and 1952.

There have been longer droughts, both in the first half of the 1930s and again in the early 2000s, and isolated portions of Montana have withered under more extreme stretches of heat and dryness for limited periods of time, but according to the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) in only three of the past 127 years have Montanans as a whole endured such bone dry conditions.

https://strangesounds.org

River Euphrates in Syria drying up, local populace affected

Sakina Fatima – September 5, 2021

Damascus: The drying up of Euphrates, Syria’s longest river is raising concerns as the demise of the water body could lead to a humanitarian disaster in the country. Millions of people in Syria are losing access to water, food and electricity.

The aid groups and engineers have expressed their concern at the possibility of a humanitarian disaster in northeastern Syria.

Rising temperatures, lower rainfall and drought across the region are depriving people of drinking water and agricultural water. This also disrupts electricity as dams run out, which in turn affects the operation of basic infrastructure, including health facilities. The rise in temperatures caused by climate change increase the risks and severity of droughts.

More than five million people in Syria directly depend on the river.

Khaled al-Khamees , a 50-year-old farmer from Rumayleh in Alepp Province, was financially affected when a creeping drought hit his land this year.

“We’re thinking of leaving because there’s no water left to drink or irrigate the trees,” Khamees told media.

Humanitarian groups in Syria also indicated that two out of three drinking water stations along the river has been pumping less water or has stopped working.

Even Iraq faces the same situation; the loss of access to water from the river and drought threatens at least seven million people.

https://www.siasat.com

California experiences driest water year in 100 years of record keeping

Ricky Scaparo – October 19, 2021

In a year of both extreme heat and extreme drought, California has reported its driest water year in terms of precipitation in a century, and experts fear the coming 12 months could be even worse.

According to KTAL5 News, The Western Regional Climate Center added average precipitation that had been reported at each of its stations and calculated that a total of 11.87 inches of rain and snow fell in California in the 2021 water year.

That’s half of what experts deem average during a water year in California: about 23.58 inches. The climate center tallies rainfall by averaging all of the measured precipitation in the state at the end of a water year, which runs Oct. 1 through Sept. 30.

LA Times reported that the climate center tallies rainfall by averaging all of the measured precipitation in the state at the end of a water year, which runs Oct. 1 through Sept. 30.

Based on the diminished levels of both precipitation and runoff, the last water year was the second driest on record, according to the California Department of Water Resources. The last time the state reported so little rain and snowfall was in 1924.

Climatologists have compared the drought conditions that spanned 2020 and 2021 to the 1976-77 drought, which included California’s lowest level of statewide runoff in a single water year. The average rainfall in 1976-77 was 28.7 inches; in 2020-21, it was 28.2 inches.

https://endtimeheadlines.org

US declares first-ever Colorado River water shortage – Arizona and Nevada affected

Strange Sounds – August 17, 2021

For the first time ever, the US federal government has declared a water shortage on the Colorado River.

That’s because Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, is lower than it’s ever been. It provides water to 25 million people across Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico, but as of Monday it’s at just 1,067 feet above sea level – about 35% full.

The federal water-shortage declaration means that Arizona and Nevada will face mandatory water cut-backs in January. The cuts will mostly affect farmers in Arizona; the state will lose about one-fifth of the water it normally gets from the river.

“It’s very significant,” explains Brad Udall, senior water and climate scientist at Colorado State University. “It’s something that those of us in the climate community have been worried about for over a decade, based on declining flows and increasing droughts.”

Drought Monitor, which tracks such conditions across the country. Last week, 26.5% of the country was in “extreme” or “exceptional” drought.

Such droughts will probably become more common and more intense as global temperatures continue to rise in the coming decades. Rising temperatures will also reduce the snowpack that would normally replenish the Colorado River every year. That could lead to more severe water cutbacks.

https://strangesounds.org

Drought Indicators in Western U.S. Flash Warnings of the ‘Big One’

Brian K Sullivan and Elizabeth Elkin – June 24, 2021

(Bloomberg) — Sarah Brunner opened the irrigation spigots on her farm in March, three months early. The rain should have still been falling in California. Now that summer is taking hold, she and her husband are considering shifting their meager water supplies into pastures so their animals will have enough to eat.

Brunner’s worries don’t stop at the barnyard. The family’s fields of shallots, garlic and goats are surrounded by thick Northern California forests, dried out and primed to burn. An early season wildfire near her home recently prompted Brunner to document her possessions and reevaluate her fire insurance. “I don’t feel safe anymore. It’s going to hit us hard,” she says. “There’s no doubt about it, we’re going to be inundated with fires. It’s just a matter of time.”

Drought in a habitat shared with bears, cougars and coyotes, all searching for a drink, has a way of compounding the danger. “The animals are going to get more desperate,” Brunner says.

Unstoppable drought is rolling over California and the Western U.S. once again, as it has with little interruption since the new century began. Nearly 98% of land across 11 Western states is abnormally dry, and more than 90% is covered by some category of drought—the worst levels in the U.S. Drought Monitor’s 21-year history. Reservoirs have drained to their bottoms, leaving bath-tub rings on their shorelines. Rivers reduced to trickles are setting off conflicts for dwindling water rights. Millions of acres of trees and shrubs have turned from shade to fuel for the out-of-control blazes everyone predicts will come.

“As far as drought goes, this is the big one, especially if we are talking about the broader drought across the whole Southwest,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles. “By a lot of metrics, it is the most severe drought on record.”

https://finance.yahoo.com

Apocalyptic mice plague ravages Australia: First came the drought. Then, the floods. Now, the mouse…

Strange Sounds – June 23, 2021

First came the drought. Then, the floods. Now, the mice. Farmers in Australia are burning their own crops. They’re desperate to escape an epic plague infesting their hay. The mice are invading homes. They’re destroying crops. They even force the evacuation of prisons. They’re chewing through appliances, sofas, cars — and livelihoods.

Colin Tink, 63, has been farming all his life and has never experienced a mouse plague like the one ravaging Australia’s eastern grain belt. Nor a drought like the one that preceded it, which turned fertile crop areas into dust bowls.

When the rains finally came last year, Tink thought his fortunes were changing.

The rain led to bumper crops through the spring and summer months (September to March in the Southern Hemisphere). Silos are overflowing with grain. And barns are piled high with hay. Tink grew enough hay to feed his cattle for two years.

Then the mice arrived. Millions of them. There are so many that even a prison had to be evacuated!

The vermin burrow deep into his hay. What they don’t eat is ruined anyway as their urine trickles down through the bales. The smell is acrid. It sticks in your nose and lingers on your clothes.

“It breaks your heart a bit,” Tink said. “We’re back to square one.”

https://strangesounds.org