Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

Now the Missouri River is of special interest to me as I originally came from Missouri and spent a fair amount of time on it's banks and the many tributaries and lakes it fills. Certainly, the health of the river effects a lot of communities from Colorado (where it starts) to where it joins the Mississippi. It is the longest river in the United States. Word that it is drying up is a catastrophe as it provides drinking water for many communities, moves a lot of commerce, provides primary water supply for millions of acres of farmland, and then there are those who use it for food supply and recreation. The Missouri River is a system - not just a river flowing from point A to point B.

However, the drying up of the Missouri is not an isolated event. It is part of a much bigger problem - drought - which made the Washington Post headlines with Wet Winter Doesn't Douse Water Wars. The western United States has been in a drought for roughly the last seven years. Prior to that there was a "break" of about three years when there was another drought. Here in Oregon, we are in a drought even though we have had decent spring rains. The problem is that what precipitation we are getting (year after year) is coming too late, and not enough to make up the shortage.

The west, like many places in the world, depends on mountain snow packs for water throughout the year. The snows must come early enough, and the weather be cold enough, to create a snow pack. That snow pack then melts slowly through the hot months feeding rivers and lakes, and filling reservoirs. Snow packs are the water storage system, and if they aren't there then the only storage is what is in reservoirs. Here in Oregon, the snow falls have been either too light, too late, or hit by rapid warming and rain before the pack is created. This year, the Oregon snow pack is at one-third of normal. Washington's is at 26% of normal.

I believe that what we are seeing is drought driven by global warming. This winter was spectacular in illuminating the problem. Something shifted the weather patterns on the west coast. Southern California got drenched over and over again. In watching the weather reports, I was struck by the fact that the storms were consistently stalling way to the south and then "splitting" to miss Oregon and most of Washington all together. It didn't happen once, it happened over and over again. Meanwhile, the temperatures where I lived stayed remarkably warm with temperatures above 60 degrees in January and February. Finally, we began getting good rain which is filling the reservoirs, but the snow pack has been virtually washed away.

One of the impacts of this is that this year's salmon return is the lowest ever seen. This is (I believe) the effect of water decisions four years ago (and the same decision has been made subsequently) to not allow more water flow during the salmon migration. The competing interests have largely been agriculture and power generation. Since the salmon are on a four year cycle, those returning this year are those who survived making it to the ocean four years ago. This year's run is beyond alarming, and if repeated over the next several years, could drive wild salmon close to extinction for the Columbia basin.

The western U.S. isn't the only place with a drought problem. I was shocked when I typed "drought" into google news. Here is a partial list of the places that came back: Australia, Cambodia, Djibouti and the Horn of Africa (Drought in the Horn of Africa), Malaysia, Spain and Portugal (who have suffered the worst drought on record), Kenya (Drought Leaves Two Million Kenyans in Need of Food Aid.

I am not alone in "speculating" that these widespread droughts are due to global warming. The GeoTimes article Drought in the Horn of Africa quotes Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research as stating:

"drought seems to be increasing around the world," with warmer temperatures creating more evaporation and thus drier conditions. According to the Climate Prediction Center, Afghanistan, parts of the Caribbean and Central America, and the Mekong Basin region of Asia are all experiencing severe drought, with portions of their populations at risk of food and water shortages. In the United States, areas of the Pacific Northwest, Wyoming and Montana are also in extreme drought conditions, Trenberth says. Even with record rainfalls and heavy snow pack throughout the winter, the lake levels remain very low, perpetuating a five-year-long dry spell in the region.

While oil is making the headlines (and well it should), the water situation has been consistently suppressed as anything other than a regional issue. While most on the planet will be dramatically impacted by the decreasing availability of oil, all life on the planet will be dramatically undermined by the decreasing availability of water.

Mars comes to mind. Dusty red Mars which once had oceans - and scientists believe life. I have long had a feeling that humans may have come from Mars, and that we destroyed that planet before moving on to Earth where we started the whole process all over again. Of course I have no proof of this whatsoever, but the thought has haunted me for years. One thing that seems relatively certain is that we are on a path that will make Earth very similar to Mars.