
Climate-Driven Megadrought Is Emerging in Western U.S., Says Study - signa11
https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2020/04/16/climate-driven-megadrought-emerging-western-u-s/
======
gdubs
I recently posted a link to Bill Mollison’s “Introduction to Permaculture”,
which is available to borrow digitally on the archive.org [1]

One critical aspect of permaculture is water management. It’s usually one of
the first things you consider when designing a home, a farm, a town, a city —
even a whole region.

The crazy thing is, despite all the drought, most of our land is engineered to
“ditch” water — get it off the land as quickly as possible.

This is because too much water can cause it’s own set of problems, and the
flip side of drier summers can be flood-like rain in the wet months.

What permaculturists like to do is find ways to capture rain in a non-
destructive way, through “swales” (winding excavations that slow the water as
it moves through the land, distributing it from the valleys to the ridges,
sometimes small ponds), and deep rooted perennial prairie grasses and trees
that break up the hard pan souls and allow water to penetrate deeply. The
overall aim is to recharge the underlying aquifer.

There’s lots of secondary benefits to this kind of whole-system approach, but
at minimum we should be re-engineering our landscape to make better use of
what we’re given every year.

1:
[https://archive.org/details/introductiontope00moll/mode/2up](https://archive.org/details/introductiontope00moll/mode/2up)

~~~
wtdo
I'd love to see more innovation in farming practices. I'm a huge fan of
aquaponics. Uses around 10% of the water of current farming techniques. I've
got my own setup in my backyard. Right now I'm working on getting it started,
but I'm planning on experimenting with growing wheat, and if I ever get a
large enough system, I want to try growing trees, like almonds, which are
traditionally pretty water intensive. These aren't generally worth growing at
a small scale, but I figure if it can be done then maybe it could scale up. I
really want to try making a combine harvester for wheat that runs on rails
along the aquaponics grow beds to help in the automation.

------
DennisP
Drought like this, driven by global warming, was predicted in the book _Six
Degrees_ by Mark Lynas, published in 2007.

He read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and
summarized them, one chapter per degree, with extensive references. Massive
drought in the western U.S. was in his chapter for one degree of warming,
right where we're at now.

Given what's in his later chapters, I'm not too happy about seeing him
accurate so far.

~~~
sails
what's in his later chapters?

~~~
DennisP
It's been several years since I read it, but up through two degrees, things
were a terrible mess but life goes on. By three degrees, the South American
rainforest burns to the ground, and some major agricultural regions dry up
because they depends on dry-season melt from glaciers that don't exist
anymore. Hundreds of millions of refugees.

After that it got bad. I forget the details but by four degrees it looked to
me like modern civilization would have a hard time staying viable, and by six
it was hard to imagine our species surviving.

~~~
a6w45j4jrs4
EPICA core samples show fluctuations of 16 degrees over 100ky, but there is no
evidence of ancient rainforests burning. I'm not denying anthropogenic climate
change but it's difficult to take such predictions seriously.

And yes, I use throwaway accounts because the HN hivemind slaughters anyone
that goes against the mainstream opinion. If you don't want to respond to me
because of this, then don't. If moderators want to remove this comment, then
by all means please do. But I don't know who it helps.

~~~
psadri
16 degrees warmer or cooler?

~~~
hindsightbias
I believe it's the range from hottest to coolest, over 100KY. Which of course
is exactly like a 2-3C change over a couple of hundred years, so no big
deal... right? /s

------
roenxi
Probably a more relevant point - war, famine, plague and chaos are still
things that happen in 2020. It would be helpful if the population at large
accepted that bad things happen in prosperous places and prepare for them.

The climate-driven thing is topical, but you don't need climate change to have
a 1 in 1,000 year drought. JIT production would have doomed any society up
until around 1800AD and it really hasn't been tested all that well in the last
70 years in wealthy and peaceful nations.

------
michaelbrave
A lot of the western US has been in drought nearly my entire life. They have
been using the underground rivers nearly to depletion (Kansas) or importing
water via massive pipelines from other states (California). It's been
completely mismanaged even down to choice of crop (I.E. Almonds aren't drought
friendly and should not be grown in places that have them).

I imagine if things get even slightly worse it could help lead to a collapse.

~~~
symplee
Are these repurposed oil pipelines? Or dedicated fresh water pipelines built
specifically to replenish water supplies?

I'd imagine as oil declines, the pipelines from the gulf might be able to send
desalinated water back inland.

Not sure how feasible this would be, thoughts?

~~~
readmodifywrite
The issue there is desalinating the water in an environmentally responsible
way. It's hugely energy intensive.

~~~
symplee
There have been some encouraging results recently. For example:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22269115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22269115)

In any case, the time frame we're talking about is 10-20 years from now. Lots
of time for even more breakthroughs.

------
grandinj
Hmmm, I would think the massive sucking dry of the aquifers by farms and
cities using massive pumping schemes would be more to blame.

Once you pull the aquifer down far enough, the surface starts to dry up,
plants stop holding the soil together, the microclimate changes, which reduces
the water capture, etc, etc.

~~~
twojacobtwo
From the other end of the equation, if the aquifer is primarily surface fed
and does not receive input from rainfall, the aquifer will drop regardless of
the withdraw rate.

------
thaumasiotes
What would be an example of a non-climate-driven drought? Drought is a variety
of climate.

~~~
DagAgren
Drought is definitely not a variety of climate. Drought is a shortage of water
supply, which can be caused by climate, or, for instance, a change in the flow
of a river.

------
hindsightbias
Reading some of the comments on this thread, would like to ask if anyone knows
the right term to research something that has long bothered me. There are of
course people who disagree on science, data and facts. What I'm curious about
is people who claim or are science and data-driven but believe that only
certain scientific fields are engaged in organized collusion or mass delusion.
For instance, a biologist I met who thought archeologists are covering up
young Earth, an astronomer who thinks the NIST/ASCE 9/11 Study was complete
fabulation (although they admitted they'd never read it), and engineers I know
who insist climatologists are all just in it for the money.

While I understand why the general populace may hold such views, I'm curious
as to if there have been studies concerning how a population of those who
believe in scientific method can so strongly believe their peers in selective
(usually other) fields are so differently motivated.

~~~
milesvp
This one can be quite complicated, but I wonder how much of it is actually
related to the quote that goes something like “science progresses one death at
a time”. Which is talking about a bigger problem in science, which is that
tenured scientists have either too much invested in their careers or too much
vested in their models to allow the spread of upstart scientists’ ideas.
There’s often a generational aspect (though don’t confuse this with age, since
someone new to a field at 70 would be a younger generation) where newer
scientists pick up on some thing that older scientists ignored and they start
spreading it’s importance, then 20 years later, once the last of the old guard
leave the field, it’s no longer downplayed and science can ‘advance’ (there is
some risk that said thing wasn’t actually important, but for hard sciences
data tends to trump all else).

So then the question to your question becomes more, are these contrarians
representative of some new wave? As a trained economist, I’ve been trained to
be skeptical of entrenched establishments, usually people will fail to believe
that which threatens their paychecks. So the other question is, are there big
incentives to encourage the established field to continue believing what it
believes?

I will say there are a lot of crackpots out there, and novices tend to be
wrong a lot, so the way science is currently done isn’t such a bad thing. But
it would be wise to at least listen occasionally to cross discipline
contrarians. They will often bring up arguments that are strong from their
primary field, without being weighed down with baggage from the other field.
You get an occasional Eli Whitney, or if you’re really lucky a John Nash.

One last thought. Hard sciences are hard for a reason, reality keeps them in
check. And experiments allow for falsifiable hypotheses. There are a lot of
sciences that rely primarily on observation, with little to no
experimentation. This makes falsifiability tricky. This also means you’re
going to see more general dissent associated with these fields (and if you
don’t see it within the field that might be a red flag).

------
theferalrobot
Genuine question: Isn’t global warming supposed to cause more rainfall?

~~~
me_me_me
It's a loaded term really. Global warming is umbrella term for 'Extreme
Weather Conditions'.

You get mega droughts followed by mega flooding (depending on region).

Those are tied to global increase in mean temperature.

~~~
chrisco255
None of this is actually true. Rain patterns are driven by ocean currents. And
oceans are driven my Multi-decadal oscillations. Shifts in rain patterns due
to these oscillations have always occurred.

~~~
me_me_me
Not sure what you mean by that. The number and severeness of natural disasters
is only increasing[0].

Shifts in rain patterns due to these oscillations have always occurred, what
does this mean?

[0] [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-natural-
disaste...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-natural-disaster-
events)

~~~
chrisco255
It says number of "recorded" natural disasters. Do you really think there was
only 6 natural disasters in 1920 in the whole world or is this data set a
function of a time when the world was not: 1) interconnected by weather
satellites and radios 2) globalized with regards to trade and 3) had open data
and sharing between governments and standards for reporting on them

That means climate change is a natural function going back billions of years.
See:

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-
sci...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-
sciences/atlantic-multidecadal-oscillation)

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-
sci...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-
sciences/pacific-decadal-oscillation)

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-
sci...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/el-
nino)

Here's hurricane data in US going back to 1800s:
[https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/All_U.S._Hurricanes.htm...](https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/All_U.S._Hurricanes.html)

(Note, we didn't have instrumentation for measuring exact strength of
hurricanes prior to satellite era in the 1970s)

~~~
me_me_me
It feels like you care strongly about it.

So I am sorry chrisco, but I am not sure what you are alluding to?

------
mark_l_watson
Sad but true. I live in the mountains of central Arizona. This year has been
good (8 inches so far, our yearly average is 18 inches for the entire year).
Last year was also good.

But, long term, the whole southwest is in a long term worrisome position.

------
yters
It'd be interesting to hear plans for viable ways forward, instead of one side
saying there is no problem, and the other side saying there is a problem and
the only solution is X (which is a tragedy of the commons type solution). It'd
also be interesting to hear the potential upsides (along with the catastrophic
downsides) with what is going on. And, if there are absolutely no upsides and
everything is going to end horribly no matter what we do, then how can we make
the best of our remaining time?

~~~
epistasis
> other side saying there is a problem and the only solution is X (which is a
> tragedy of the commons type solution).

You may want to broaden your sources, I can't imagine how you got the
impression of "only solution is X."

There are all sorts of mitigation plans, all sorts of energy transition plans.
Nobody know what will work in the end, what new unforeseen technologies will
be developed, and how the costs will change as industry scales technologies,
so there's a huge variety.

If your X == "stop emitting greenhouse gasses," well, there's tons of ways to
do that. Many of which will massively increase economic productivity.

There are occasional large reports that spell out various routes to stop
emitting GHG. There are resources like Project Drawdown that investigate these
potential of a hundred different climate interventions. There are focused news
media like GreenTech Media that focus on technology interventions. There are
an abundance of governmental reports on ways to meet our climate goals, on all
sorts of particulars, for example I was reading a great one last night about
electricity of buildings in California or using renewable natural gas [1].

There's soooo many books, forums, advocacy groups, policy wonks, podcasts,
news outlets, etc. focused on exploring what you say you want to hear. So many
that it's hard to even suggest a starting point. Imagine if somebody said "I'd
be interested in hearing more about computers and the internet," how would you
start pointing them to the general resources for something so broad?

[1]
[https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/2019publications/CEC-500-2019-055/...](https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/2019publications/CEC-500-2019-055/CEC-500-2019-055-F.pdf)

~~~
yters
That's great to hear. Unfortunately, such perspectives don't seem to make
their way to the news sources I generally consume (i.e. TV ads,
news.google.com, etc.). The level of exposure I get tends to come across more
as doom and gloom: all the icecaps are melting, climate catastrophes
everywhere, etc. and so we must force these unwieldy CO2 based policies on the
population (and maybe drastically reduce the population and economy). So, I
think part of the strategy should be a better PR on the issue. But, maybe the
non doom and gloom perspective doesn't sell as well?

------
LatteLazy
Aka human driven.

~~~
smitty1e
Overpopulation: who can understand it?

I was at Mesa Verde a decade ago and asked the Park Service person explaining
the cliff dwellings what the ancient population of the Southwest was.

One estimate, I was told, put it at 30k.

------
addHocker
I always wondered, if there is a way to geoengineer clouds to refill those
aquifiers. Find out the main windband going there, go over the ocean, create a
artifical thermic (via solar) and produce lots of moisture (ultrasonic foggers
driven by solar?), creating rainclouds in a synethetic way.

~~~
flooddthvalley
Ultrasonic foggers would also increase the amount of salt in the air, so you’d
have to run them far out in the sea.

Instead, flood Death Valley with ocean water:

1\. Massive evaporative potential. 2\. Moisture trapped by tall mountains
replenishing the aquifer and making lush surroundings. 3\. Massive hydro
potential 4\. Displaced species not seriously harmed since the moisture
gradient would be large (are P. 2) 5\. You could harvest the salt prolonging
the suitability of the project (anyway measured in centuries if not millennia)

Basically you’d have the lushness of the surroundings of Salt Lake City
(compared to the desert anyway). Except there would be a lot more moisture
(lower salinity wrt it Salt Lake, moisture better trapped)

You could do the same thing in Egypt at the Qatara depression, except with
potentially global benefits. Here the half of the Sahara could be turned into
productive farm land.

~~~
thehappypm
Sigh. Let's destroy a vast ecosystem and fundamentally change the atmosphere
of a hugely important agricultural region. Let's not solve one problem by
creating 10.

~~~
flooddthvalley
What are these problems? I’ve asked (many) geologists and the best answer they
come up with is salt seepage into the aquifer if it’s not done right, and a
temporary increase of seismic activity due to relaxation from the added
weight.

Look, the Three Gorges damn is much larger than this and much much more
destructive. Entire cities disappeared.

But it also generates 22 GW of power.That’s an _insane_ amount of coal that
wasn’t burned.

So choose: burn coal. Burn U235. Flood valleys. Sashimi the birds. Carpet the
desert with glass. Or massively decrease your standard of living.

For the record, I’m actually in favor of the last option.

~~~
thehappypm
Why do you think geologists are the right specialists for this question? I
would imagine geological concerns would indeed be mild, but meteorological
effects could be monstrous as the weather created by this new sea would
massively impact local climates, which could have far-reaching downstream
impact.

------
hnarn
The era of fossil fuels will go down in history, if any history is preserved,
as the point where human ignorance was no longer held back by lack of
capacity. We are so doped up on carbon-based fuel that we are completely
oblivious to the total dependency our way of life has on it. A simple thought
experiment by the way of "what does it take to produce a pencil"[1] will give
anyone insight in this. Sometimes I feel like we just don't have the
collective mental capacity to handle mega-issues like these. And in the end,
just like an addict, unless we kick the habit we are collectively, as a
species, going to walk hand in hand into oblivion.

[1]:
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2153998.I_Pencil](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2153998.I_Pencil)

~~~
growlist
I'm a small c conservative, and as part of this I care about the environment,
and from my perspective there are a number of ways that the environmental
movement don't do themselves any favours. Firstly there are those amongst them
that come across far too preachy, in a way that can be a turn-off. Nobody
constantly wants to hear bad news and moralising and be told they are
personally responsible for all these problems, when most are just trying to
get by in a system they didn't create, and have little real influence over.
Secondly some of them oppose even the suggestion of technical solutions,
preferring instead to emphasise that a kind of hair-shirt existence of
drastically poorer lifestyles is all we have the right to expect, as if we've
committed some kind of moral crime and only penance will suffice. Thirdly and
related to both of the first two points, some (most?) of them are tightly
bound to leftist political movements - sometimes tending to the extreme -
which both immediately alienates people like me, and makes me suspicious that
they are merely using the green movement as a vehicle for ulterior concerns,
and indeed some of them are actually completely open about this:

'I’m here to say that XR isn’t about the climate. You see, the climate’s
breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system of that has infected the ways we
relate to each other as humans and to all life. This was exacerbated when
European ‘civilisation’ was spread around the globe through cruelty and
violence (especially) over the last 600 years of colonialism, although the
roots of the infections go much further back.'

[https://medium.com/extinction-rebellion/extinction-
rebellion...](https://medium.com/extinction-rebellion/extinction-rebellion-
isnt-about-the-climate-42a0a73d9d49)

'Greta Thunberg: Climate crisis "not just about environment," but also
"colonial, racist, patriarchal systems of oppression"'

[https://disrn.com/news/greta-thunberg-climate-crisis-not-
jus...](https://disrn.com/news/greta-thunberg-climate-crisis-not-just-about-
environment-but-also-colonial-racist-patriarchal-systems-of-oppression)

I could go on to point out the myriad inconsistencies in the positions of
these groups e.g. pro-environment/pro-migration, pro-environment/anti
population control, but I'll leave it there. If I think about it for too long
it makes me angry because I think these groups are doing more harm than good,
and I question whether they really care about the environment at all.

~~~
pcmaffey
Not sure how you can care about protecting the environment while explicitly
ignoring investigation into what’s harming the environment? Unless you believe
human activity is not driving climate change, then of course environmentalism
is linked to anti-globalization sentiment.

~~~
growlist
> Not sure how you can care about protecting the environment while explicitly
> ignoring investigation into what’s harming the environment?

Can you point to where I advocated for this? I was just pointing out that the
groups that have chosen to attempt to monopolise environmental issues for
themselves might deserve scrutiny. Remove these groups with ulterior motives -
who in any case have proven themselves not particularly effective - and we
might get closer to a more grown up debate. Isn't it funny how they choose to
hammer rich, liberal democracies that are doing the most for climate change,
whilst conveniently avoiding protest in countries where they might get beaten
up/thrown in jail?

> Unless you believe human activity is not driving climate change, then of
> course environmentalism is linked to anti-globalization sentiment.

Well there's another contradiction for you then: anti-globalization/pro
migration.

~~~
triceratops
> Isn't it funny how they choose to hammer rich, liberal democracies that are
> doing the most for climate change, whilst conveniently avoiding protest in
> countries where they might get beaten up/thrown in jail?

Rich countries emit the most carbon per capita and are responsible for the
lion's share of past emissions. So the first part of that sentence is rank BS.

Activists are obviously gonna activize in their own countries, most of which
happen to be rich, liberal democracies. In case you care, even poor
democracies have their domestic climate and environmental movements. Non-
democracies usually don't have open political movements of any sort.

------
m0zg
This is all wonderful but could someone explain why scientists, who claim they
can predict when (and if) a drought would start, at the same time can't
predict when (and if) it would end? Case in point: nobody predicted that CA
drought would end, yet it did.

~~~
noelwelsh
I don't like seeing the kind of belligerent ignorance you're peddling going
unchallenged.

The claim, in the first paragraph of the article, is:

"a megadrought as bad or worse than anything even from known prehistory is
very likely in progress"

Note it is "very likely". This is not the same as being certain. Note the
drought has already started (quoting Science Mag: "the period from 2000 to
2018 was the driest 19-year span since the late 1500s and the second driest
since 800 CE").

As for the CA drought ending, the state is currently 35% in drought
([https://www.drought.gov/drought/states/california](https://www.drought.gov/drought/states/california)).
The rain that ended the drought seems like it was fairly inconsequential
against the long term trend.

~~~
m0zg
Yeah, I think I'm done believing models where the authors reputation is not on
the line if the model turns out to be dead wrong. You can call it "ignorance",
I call it "common sense".

