Severe heat and drought are wreaking havoc around the world #severe #heat #drought #wreaking #havoc #globe OLASMEDIA TV NEWSThis is what we have for you today:
The summer of 2022 has seen a significant, ongoing drought around the world, from Europe to China, to the US and Africa, with serious consequences, from energy shortages to severe food insecurity.
Places like California in the US have suffered from drought for years, with statewide restrictions on the use of water become the norm. But record droughts in other parts of the world, such as Europe and Asia, are affecting everything from agriculture to energy transportation. Many places now experiencing extreme heat and drought, such as the UK, do not necessarily have the infrastructure to deal with such extreme weather events. And if it rains is doing eventually falls, it is likely to cause flooding due to ongoing heat and drought, as well as the massive amount of built-up precipitation that is released all at once.
This summer’s widespread drought doesn’t paint a particularly hopeful picture for our collective climate future, and while some places like China turn to creative approaches such as cloud seeding to at least protect agriculture, heatwaves are likely to become more severe in the future – contributing to further droughts. That means more wildfires, more challenges to agriculture, especially in poor countries, and more displacement and famine.
Drought is everywhere and has different causes
Droughts are not unprecedented events; they have happened throughout history and contributed to devastating effects such as: famine and displacement. The most serious drought incident ever in the US is the dust bowl from the thirtiesin which, among other things, low rainfall, extreme heat and severe financial problems caused by the Great Depression intersect to cause crop failures, poverty and displacement in parts of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma.
The droughts that now plague parts of North America, Horn of AfricaChina, Britain and Europe do not necessarily have one cause. Droughts are in many cases a combination of very little rain and high temperatures. When temperatures rise, water evaporates faster, and when it falls, it’s more likely to fall as rain rather than snow because of those same high temperatures, as Vox’s Neel Dhanesha explained. In California and the American West, snow suit — layers of snow kept frozen due to freezing temperatures, which then melt as temperatures rise – is an important source of water. So less snow due to higher temperatures means that water extraction is less reliable, and likely will continue for decades to come – contributing to drought.
As Vox’s Benji Jones wrote, agriculture in parts of California and Arizona is suffering from drought in the Colorado River and low water levels in two reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Farmers are the main users of water from the Colorado River, and while some have already reduced their supply, the drought is unlikely to abate anytime soon — meaning future austerity measures will be necessary. That will be a problem for many Americans already reeling from high food prices due to inflation, Jones wrote:
If farmers use less water, they tend to produce less food. And that could drive food prices up, even more than… they already have. Winter vegetables, such as lettuce and broccoli, can take a big hit, as can Arizona’s delectable wheat. Even more worryingly, the shrinking Colorado River is just one of many climate-related disasters that threaten the supply and affordability of food.
In the Horn of Africa, four consecutive rainy seasons have produced little rain the region’s worst drought in 40 years. Occasional droughts were to be expected in the region, which includes Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, something for communities to prepare for; in 2022, the biennial rainy seasons have again failed to push millions toward starvation. In 2020 and 2021, the spring rainy season, called the gu, which usually lasts from March to May, fell short. In 2021, the deyr, which lasts from October to December, also failed, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory. “These back-to-back blows are hard for farmers to take,” Ashutosh Limaye, a scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center said in January. “The challenge is not just soil moisture or precipitation variations; it is the resilience of the population to drought.”
China’s droughts in Hubei and Chongqing have been combined with heavy rainfall in other parts of the west, the Washington Post reported. In Chongqing, temperatures have reached 113 degrees Fahrenheit; in Xinwen County, Sichuan Province, temperatures reached 110°F last week. That extreme heat has dried up parts of the Yangtze River — a vital waterway and the longest river in China. The drought has caused extensive crop damage and limited access to drinking water in Hubei province, according to local emergency services, and electricity from the Three Gorges Dam – the world’s largest – has fallen by about 40 percent from last year. Bloomberg reports:.
Although coal supplies electricity in many provinces, the heat and drought in China has led to energy rationing in Sichuan, with authorities forcing factories to close to conserve energy. The province is a crucial hub for the production of solar panels and semiconductors, as CNN reportsbut the use of air conditioning in homes and businesses has risen sharply as a result of the heat wave, which is straining the electricity grid and the drought has depleted the hydroelectric power station.
China also turns to cloud seeding — charging clouds with silver iodide to form ice crystals, resulting in precipitation — to try and save crop yield, as the Associated Press reported. While several countries, including the United States, have cloud seeding research programs, the technology has been around since the 1940s, such as: Laura Kuhl writes for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. According to Kuhl, however, this is not a permanent solution; for starters, it doesn’t address the underlying cause of climate change, nor does it promote other mitigation efforts. Furthermore, there may be unknown effects of cloud seeding, such as toxic build-up from the silver iodide commonly used to create condensation, and experts are not fully aware of its efficacy or how it will affect hydrological patterns in the long run.
Europe, particularly Britain, is also suffering from record heat and drought. Temperatures in the UK reached 104°F last week and nearly 109°F in southwestern France, according to Axios. Forest fires ravage parts of France, Spain and Portugal; rivers in Italy and Germany are so low that warships and bombs sunk during World War II are exposed, Reuters reports:.
Double heatwaves have combined with record rainfall shortages to produce drought in some parts of England, as the New York Times reported last week. It is Britain’s first official drought since 2018; While drought is not unheard of in this part of the world, the combination of record temperatures and low rainfall also contributed to fires in July and August in London, which the London Fire Brigade was unable to fight due to staffing and cutbacks, union officials from the emergency services told the Times.
Already feeling the pressure of energy cuts due to sanctions on Russian fuel exports, Europe faces further challenges from the drought, the That reports the New York Times. In Germany, ships carrying coal cannot safely navigate the shallow rivers, and Norway’s hydropower production, which supplies about 90 percent of the country’s energy supply, hasn’t been this low in more than two decades.
“We are not familiar with drought,” Sverre Eikeland, chief operating officer of Norwegian energy company Agder Energi, told the Times. “We need water.”
What do these droughts say about our climate future – and what can we do?
While extreme heat, drought and flooding have historical antecedents and intersecting causes, weather patterns in the summer of 2022 have been exacerbated by human behaviour, primarily industrialization and fossil fuel use, which is driving climate change.
According to the World Weather Attribution Initiative, an international consortium of climate scientists studying the causes of extreme weather events, the temperatures observed in the UK in July – up to 40.3 degrees Celsius, or nearly 105 degrees Fahrenheit, were “extremely unlikely” without human-induced climate change. “While Europe has been experiencing heatwaves with increasing frequency in recent years, the recently observed heat in the UK is so extreme that it is also a rare occurrence in the current climate,” the study found. That study, which combined observation and model analyses, found that human-caused climate change made excessive temperatures at least 10 times more likely.
“The first truth is that we live in a nightmare”, NASA Climate Scientist Kate Marvel told Axios about the extreme heat in Europe. “This is exactly what climate models predicted would happen: more extreme weather, dire public health consequences, and incredibly frustrating Congressional inaction. There’s no reasonable scenario where warming stops at 1.2°C, so it’s definitely going to get worse.”
governments and aid organizations try to cope with drought and the resulting famine, energy austerity, wildfires, water shortages and other crises with strategies such as water and energy rationing and aid distribution, but the time has already passed for aggressive action to mitigate climate change. In fact, trends seem to be going the other way, with Europe again switch to coal-fired power stations as a result of sanctions on Russian fuel and increased US greenhouse gas emissions last year, after years of stagnation or declineaccording to a report from the Rhodium Group.
There is not just one quick fix, such as cloud seeding, to the problem of heat and drought; it has taken hundreds of years to reach the level of crisis that is now unfolding in the world, and it will take significant, dedicated efforts to produce any mitigating effects. Recent legislation passed in the US is taking steps to make clean energy and electric vehicles available to more people. It’s just a start, though — and if this summer’s drought is any indication, there’s no time to waste taking more serious measures.