Most people are aware that increases in the frequency and power of hurricanes and typhoons can be attributed to climate change. The devastating scenes from New Orleans, after it had been struck by hurricane Katrina, are still vivid in people’s minds. Few people are aware that climate change will cause severe droughts in many parts of the world and turn fertile lands into deserts.
In 2006, Eleanor Burke and her colleague at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Britain wrote that one third of the planet will be a desert by 2100 if climate change is not addressed urgently. They used a measure called Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) to predict where moderate to severe droughts will happen. The PDSI figures for moderate droughts, at the moment, are 25% of the earth’s land surface. The study found that this will increase to 50% by the end of this century. The findings for severe droughts are even more alarming. These will jump from a current 8% to 40%, and extreme droughts, which affect 3% of the earth today, will affect 30% of the earth within 100 years. The authors of the report admitted that there are “uncertainties” with their predictions since they only used one climate change model and one future scenario of greenhouse gas emission which is in the moderate-to-severe range. Nevertheless, the head of the Hadley Center’s climate program, Vicky Pope, said that the findings were significant.*
IN AFRICA OR CALIFORNIA
Africa immediately comes to mind when we think of droughts. There have been crippling droughts in east Africa. Kenya’s Rift Valley has experienced droughts throughout this decade, which left cattle and other animals dead from lack of food and water and humans malnourished and hungry. In 2006, 11 million people in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Tanzania were affected by drought.
It is not only poor countries in Africa which are in danger of having more prolonged droughts. In early February 2009, Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate who has been appointed Secretary of Energy by President Barack Obama, told the Los Angeles Times that California’s agriculture could be reduced to a dust bowl and its cities disappear unless there is timely action on climate change.* Chu pointed out that the warming has caused a marked decline in the Sierra mountains snowpack. These snow capped mountains act as a natural storage system for water for both agriculture and human consumption. Chu predicted that, unless global warming is contained, there could be a 90% reduction in the Sierra snowpack. This would mean disaster for California.
But, even this year, water is a problem. Bill Diedrich, who is a fourth generation almond grower in California’s Central Valley, expects that many of his trees will not survive the drought. “It is one of the grimmest water situations we’ve ever faced,” he said. It’s an absolute emergency and anything to get the water flowing quickly is needed.”* Lester Snow, director of the California Department of Water Resources, told reporters that the state faces its most severe drought since the early 1990s. The Central Valley in California, stretching 400 miles, is the world’s largest agricultural area. Half of the salads and vegetables consumed in the U.S. are grown there. Huge areas are covered with almond trees. If this rich farmland is lost to agriculture, as Secretary Chu fears, this will be a catastrophe for the U.S. and the world.
Chu is alarmed because he does not think that “the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen (through climate change).” How could they after eight years of denial, that climate change was happening, by the administration of former President George W. Bush! He was not alone: a whole swathe of U.S. industries, especially the petrochemical ones, through the Carbon Club television advertisements, bombarded the American people with anti-climate change propaganda throughout the 1900s. In 2008, Exxon was still bankrolling climate skeptics.
A TSUNAMI OF FIRE
One cannot say of any single weather event, whether it be the Big Wind in Ireland in 1839, or the damage which hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi in 2005, or the recent heat wave and bushfires in Victoria, Australia, that is caused by climate change. What one can say is that severe weather events, which heretofore happened once every 50 or 100 years, will happen now much more frequently. For the past number of years, scientists have been warning that climate change will bring higher temperatures to Australia and less rain. This will cause further record heat waves and forest fires.
Even before the percentage of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increased, Australia was one of the driest continents on earth. Its vegetation, dominated by oil rich eucalyptus trees, has meant that forest fires have happened frequently in the past. On “Black Friday” in 1939, 71 people were killed by forest fires. In 1983, a forest fire on Ash Wednesday destroyed a huge amount of property and killed 75 people. Nevertheless, there is a growing consensus that climate change is making forest fires more frequent and ferocious. Gary Morgan, the head of the government-backed Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, believes that climate change and droughts are altering the nature, ferocity and duration of bushfires. Scientists, such as Professor David Karoly of Melbourne, said that the current heatwave with temperatures reaching 45 degrees centigrade was unusual but that it will be much more frequent within the next 10 to 20 years. Research by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the government-backed science organization CSIRO predict that the number of days where bushfires might pose a severe risk in South-Eastern Australia could almost double by 2050 under the worse case climate change scenario. Commenting on the current bushfires which have claimed the lives of over 200 people, Bob Brown, leader of the Green Party in the Australian Senate, said that it is a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put tackling climate change as a top priority.
CHAOS IN THE CITIES
In late January 2009, the Australian Open Tennis Tournament was held during the hottest weather ever recorded for any major sporting event. Novak Djokovic sensationally pulled out of the quarter final with heat-related problems. Chaos reigned in Melbourne on January 30, 2009 when excessive heat caused an electricity substation to explode. Half a million homes and business in the city lost power. City trains were shut down. People were trapped for hours in lifts and many roads were blocked as traffic lights failed. The emergency services were stretched to breaking point, as many people succumbed to heat-induced exhaustion.
Climate change is also affecting rainfall patterns in Western Australia. From 1829, (when weather records began to be compiled) up to 1975, winter rains were reliable in the area. This meant that farmers could plant winter wheat and be certain that the crop would get sufficient rains for it to thrive. However, since 1975, the average rainfall has dropped by 15%. Again, it is probably too early to say why this is happening but, more and more, climatologists are pointing the finger at climate change.
The city of Perth, which is the capital of Western Australia, is also suffering from a serious shortage of water. With the decrease in winter rains, Perth has to draw on ground water reserves known as the Gnangara Mount to meet its water needs. After 30 years of ‘mining,’ this water reserve is at a critically low level, causing water experts to believe that there is a one-in-five chance of a ‘catastrophic failure of supply.’ They are now planning to build a desalination plant to provide fresh water for the city at the cost of A$350 million. Even with this huge expenditure, the proposed plant will only supply 15% of the city’s current needs. So it would seem that, because of climate change, the future of this city of one-and-a-half million people is in the balance.
On a per capita basis, Australians emit more greenhouse gas than any other people on earth. This is because most of the electricity generated in Australia is produced from coal – because it is so plentiful. It would be quite extraordinary if the severe weather patterns and habitat changes which climate change is bringing about, made vast areas of Australia uninhabitable for humans.
* Suzanne Goldenberg, “California dust bowl warning: energy chief says cities will perish unless action is taken,” The Guardian, February 5, 2009, pages 26 and 27.
** Dan Glaister, “It’s an absolute emergency, say farmers on the frontline,” The Guardian, February 5, 2009, page 27.
