Along with carbon, water is the other great problem of this century. And, of course, the two are intimately related because the biggest impacts of carbon-driven climate change are projected to be on the hydrological cycle.
The American Prospect magazine has a special report on the water crisis in its June issue. If you want to get up to speed on the water issue, this is a good place to start:
The British and the Chinese understand global warming has driven their record flooding. The United States? Not so much.
Although you wouldn’t know it from most U.S. media coverage (here or here or here), the record “once-in-a-hundred-year flooding” the Midwest now seems to be getting every decade or so is precisely what scientists have been expecting from the warming.
A 2004 analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center found an increase during the 20th century of “precipitation, temperature, streamflow, heavy and very heavy precipitation and high streamflow in the East.” They found a 14 percent increase in “heavy rain events” of greater than 2 inches in one day, and a 20 percent increase in “very heavy rain events”-best described as deluges-greater than 4 inches in one day. These extreme downpours are precisely what is predicted by global warming scientists and models.
In fact, 2007 saw the second most extreme precipitation over the United States in the historical record, according to NCDC’s Climate Extremes Index (CEI). Here is a plot of the percentage of this country (times two) with much greater than normal proportion of precipitation derived from extreme 1-day precipitation events (where extreme equals the highest tenth percentile of deluges):
Didn’t know that our government kept a Climate Extremes Index? Why would you? The media never writes about it.
One of global warming’s most immediate and devastating effects comes from the melting glaciers. From Bhutan to Peru, glacier melt is accelerating. As the Melting Andean Glaciers Could Leave 30 Million High and Dry puts it:
Loss of glaciers in the Andes mountain range is threatening the water supply of 30 million people, and scientists say the lower altitude glaciers could disappear in 10 years.
What’s happening to those most closely tied to the glaciers?
His community can no longer can seed indigenous potatoes in fields located at lower levels, because sufficient water does not flow there any longer. “We must seed them to greater height. But every year that happens, also we have less earth in mountains, Felipe says. “In few years more, no longer we will have no place to seed these potatoes.”
Maybe they should move to the cities? But wait:
Extended drought certainly leads to behavior change — and it’s one of the likeliest impacts of human-caused global warming.
Since “Australia today = U.S. southwest by 2050” — let’s go down under to see our future in the making. The BBC News has a good article on “The children at Wattle Park primary school [who] have only ever known drought” [see pretty but parched kids in picture on right].
What is life like for these kids?
When they wake up they use timers to take two minute showers, and collect the water in buckets so it can be re-used in the garden.
At school they have “scarecrow monitors” whose job it is to oversee the filling of more buckets from under the drinking taps to water the school vegetable patch.
Their teacher, Randall Simons, says every drop is now watched carefully, at school and at home.
Sounds like something out of Frank Herbert’s classic, Dune. The Aussie kids have lived through ten years of drought, learning:
“Water is precious and we’ve got to realise that water’s not always there. You need to save it,” says Sonia, a pupil at Wattle Park Primary School in Melbourne.
This restriction would be the real toughie for Americans:
A few days ago, Climate Progress brought you “Breaking News: The Great Ice Age of 2008 is finally over — next stop Venus!” That scientific finding was based on the NASA (and Hadley Center) temperature data through the end of March. Now NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) weighs in with its data (here), reaffirming the end of the Great Ice Age of 2008:
Based on preliminary data, the globally averaged combined land and sea surface temperature was the second warmest on record for March and the January-March year-to-date period ranked eleventh warmest.
March 2008 missed the record for the warmest March (2002) by a whopping 0.07°F. March 2008 was the warmest March over land in the record, beating the previous record by nearly 0.3°F. And it was the warmest March over land and sea in the northern hemisphere on record by 0.2°F . 
Once again, the geographical distribution of the warming continues to be really, really bad news for those worried about …
That is the breaking news today from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and the British Antarctic Survey:
In the past 50 years, the western Antarctic Peninsula has experienced the biggest temperature increase on Earth, rising by 0.5 degree Celsius (0.9 degree Fahrenheit) per decade. NSIDC Lead Scientist Ted Scambos, who first spotted the disintegration in March, said, “We believe the Wilkins has been in place for at least a few hundred years. But warm air and exposure to ocean waves are causing a break-up.”
You can see a video of the ice-shelf post-disintegration taken from an airplane here.
Satellite images indicate that the Wilkins began its collapse on February 28; data revealed that a large iceberg, 41 by 2.5 kilometers (25.5 by 1.5 miles), fell away from the ice shelf’s southwestern front, triggering a runaway disintegration of 405 square kilometers (160 square miles) of the shelf interior (Figure 1 — click to enlarge).
That is “seven times the size of Manhattan” as Seth Borenstein of the AP helpfully points out. He notes “The rest of the Wilkins ice shelf, which is about the size of Connecticut, is holding on by a narrow beam of thin ice.” The ice shelf is floating, so it won’t add to sea level rise. Such occurrences are “more indicative of a tipping point or trigger in the climate system,” said Sarah Das, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Back to the NSIDC:
The edge of the shelf crumbled into the sky-blue pattern of exposed deep glacial ice that has become characteristic of climate-induced ice shelf break-ups such as the Larsen B in 2002. A narrow beam of intact ice, just 6 kilometers wide (3.7 miles) was protecting the remaining shelf from further breakup as of March 23 (Figure 2 — click to enlarge).
“Record Glacier Thinning Means No Time to Waste on Agreeing New International Climate Regime,” said the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) on Sunday.
That statement is based on the data of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), which “has been tracking the fate of glaciers for over a century. Continuous data series of annual mass balance, expressed as thickness change, are available for 30 reference glaciers since 1980.” Here’s the mean annual specific net balance:
“The Service calculates thickening and thinning of glaciers in terms of ‘water equivalent’. The estimates for the year 2006 indicate that further shrinking took place equal to around 1.4 metres [1400 mm] of water equivalent compared to losses of half a metre in 2005.”
Prof. Dr. Wilfried Haeberli, Director of the Service said:
“The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight…. This continues the trend in accelerated ice loss during the past two and a half decades.”
I know what you’re thinking: “Trend? No end in sight? But Dr. Haeberli, everybody knows the globe is cooling, and the apparent warming is just the urban heat island effect plus lousy temperature-recording stations.” As Dr. Haeberli might reply, if he had Jon Stewart’s sensibility, “Damn you, 30 reference glaciers!”
Why should we care about a bunch of melting glaciers?
The new monthly data from NOAA’s National Climactic Data Center agrees with the NASA data I blogged on a few days ago:
- The globally averaged combined land and sea surface temperature was the fifteenth warmest on record for February, the sixteenth warmest for boreal winter (December-February), and the January-February year-to-date period ranked twenty-second warmest.
- The presence of a strong La Niña contributed to a global average temperature that was the coolest since the La Niña episode of 2000-2001.
So it was relatively quite warm, even with a strong La Niña. No doubt the next El Niño year we see will be the warmest year on record. Anybody want to take a $1000 bet against that? Delayer-1000s, where are you?
Jeers to the Bush Administration’s NOAA/NCDC for the headline “NOAA: Coolest December-February Since 2001 for U.S., Globe.” Presumably they are happy to feed the delayer-1000 meme that we’re in a cooling trend. And the Drudge Report was happy to oblige them by running that exact headline.
Let’s get this straight. We have some short-term cooling from a strong La Niña. And a little more cooling from being at a solar irradiance minimum. And we still have the 16th warmest winter on record. The planet is warming — deal with it (please). Not only that, but the most abnormally warm place is the worst possible location from the perspective of carbon cycle feedbacks [click to enlarge]:
That’s right. We’re running upwards of 9°F warmer than normal in the land of the permafrost permamelt. This is worrisome because:
I’m working on a two-part permamelt update for Climate Progress. Definitely not for the squeamish.
Part 2 of this post will deal with Arctic ice.
See also this Jeff Masters post.
The brutal drought has ended over large parts of Australia — and consumers are obsessively reducing their demand for water — and yet water “prices are set to double in the next five to 10 years,” Water Services Association Australia executive officer Ross Young told a drought briefing in Canberra.
The focus on water conservation has never been higher:
Water is a dinner table topic. People are quite passionate about water and they are quite concerned about water in the context of climate change.
And the results are impressive:
Average daily summer water use in Melbourne during the 1990s was 1,631 litres, compared with 1,092 litres at the end of last month.
But doubled prices are still inevitable in the coming years, “as the industry funds the significant capital works programs - some $30 billion over the next five to 10 years just in new water sources for urban Australia.”
Since scientists tell us we’re turning the west into a desert, much greater water conservation, tens of billions of dollars on water infrastructure, and much higher water prices are also inevitable there.
OK, he didn’t say that directly:
I originally wasn’t going to post on this, but a number of people, including Earthbeat’s Mike Tidwell (on whose show I will be appearing Tuesday) have sent it to me.
I am certainly skeptical the Arctic will be ice free this year, but I am open to any other takers for my bet it’ll happen by the end of 2020.
Should be a no-brainer for you global coolers out there.
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