Tag: extreme drought

Driest July in memory imperils Europe’s crops

Patrick GALEY – August 3, 2022

As much of Europe bakes in a third heatwave since June, fears are growing that extreme drought driven by climate change in the continent’s breadbasket nations will dent stable crop yields and deepen the cost-of-living crisis.

The European Commission on Wednesday urged EU member states to re-use treated urban wastewater as irrigation on the continent’s parched farms, after France and parts of England saw their driest July on record.

In France, where an intense drought has hammered farmers and prompted widespread limits on freshwater use, there was just 9.7 millimetres (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.

The southwestern region of Gironde, already devastated by last month’s wildfires, saw a maximum temperature of 39.6 degrees Celsius (103 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday, with Meteo-France predicting a peak on Thursday.

Animals, including lions and monkeys, evacuated two weeks ago due to the blazes there returned to their zoo on Wednesday.

Farmers nationwide are reporting difficulties in feeding livestock because of parched grasslands, while irrigation has been banned in large areas of the northwest and southeast due to freshwater shortages.

Environment Minister Christophe Bechu said July’s rainfall represented “just 12 percent of what’s needed”.

https://www.seeddaily.com

The US Southwest is hitting megadrought status

– February 14, 2022

About half of the contiguous US is currently experiencing moderate to extreme drought—including almost all of the West. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, as widely pervasive drought has been present for quite a while now in this region, where major reservoirs like Lake Powell and Lake Mead are hovering around all-time low-water levels. But how does this ongoing drought compare to the past? After all, the region is no stranger to dry stretches.

A 2020 paper examined the 2000-2018 data in the context of a tree ring reconstruction going back to the year 800 and stretching from Southern California to Wyoming. That team found that this was likely the second-driest period in the record, beat out only by a megadrought in the late 1500s.

At the time, the paper’s authors guessed that good precipitation in 2019 would be enough to end the extended drought. But instead, a particularly wicked 2021 kept the drought alive. As a result, three of those researchers—UCLA’s Park Williams and NASA’s Benjamin Cook and Jason Smerdon—decided to update the numbers through 2021.

The most mega

The term “megadrought” isn’t some sensationalist moniker from bad television; it’s a term for the handful of two- to three-decade Southwestern droughts in the past millennium or so—some with history-defining impacts on the civilizations who lived there at the time.

With the analysis updated, 2000-2021 ranks as the driest such 22-year period in the data going back to the year 800. The megadrought years of 1571-1592 slip into second place. (Though the error bars on the two periods overlap.)

Between 2000 and 2021, 18 of those years saw soil moisture below the long-term average. Only two past megadroughts meet that level of consistent dryness. The years 2002 and 2021 rank as the 11th and 12th driest years in the whole record—and it has been three centuries since a drier year occurred. And although some megadroughts were focused in a particular region, the drought of the last two decades has been widespread across the West. That’s what you would expect to see from a drought driven more by global warming than by precipitation patterns.

To estimate the contribution of climate change, the researchers repeated their analysis of climate models run with and without warming temperatures. Their previous work had estimated that 46 percent of the severity of the 2000-2018 drought was due to human-caused warming. For 2000-2021, they get a similar answer of 42 percent despite using a new generation of climate model simulations.

https://arstechnica.com

In drought-plagued northern Mexico, tens of thousands of cows are starving to death

By Kate Linthicum – August 1, 2021

CAJEME, Mexico — In the parched hills of southern Sonora, Marco Antonio Gutierrez paced around a clearing, counting the dead.There were seven rotting carcasses — jutting ribs and shriveled hides — and two sun-bleached skulls. Nine cows, felled by heat and hunger.

“There’s nothing for them to eat,” said Gutierrez, a wide-brimmed hat shading his downcast eyes. “There used to be big ranches here. Now it’s pure sorrow.”

Two years of extreme drought have turned large stretches of northern Mexico into a boneyard. Between starvation and ranchers forced to prematurely sell or slaughter their livestock, officials say the number of cattle in Sonora has dropped from 1.1 million to about 635,000.

It’s an unimaginable loss for a state that is world-famous for its high-quality cows, and where beef is not just a central part of the diet and economy but also a tradition that binds families together.

This is a place, after all, with a bull on its state flag, and where families gather every Sunday around their charcoal grills. Red meat is considered a birthright: It’s not uncommon for folks here to eat beef three times a day — machaca scrambled with eggs for breakfast, arrachera for lunch and carne asada for dinner.

Gutierrez, 55, and pretty much everyone he knows was born ranching. By the age of 10, he and his friends had all learned from their fathers how to lasso, brand and even pull a calf from the womb.

Now, as they desperately watch the skies for rain, they wonder if there’s any future in it.

https://www.latimes.com