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Climate Story of the Year: Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security

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"Climate Story of the Year: Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security"

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This year has seen a great many important climate stories.  Obviously, the continued self-destructive failure of the nation and the world to reverse greenhouse gas emission trends always deserve to be the top story in some sense:

The emergence of a genuine grassroots movement following Obama’s fecklessness on the environment is a major U.S. story (see “A Climate Movement Is Born: Ozone Decision Spikes Total Arrests to 1,252 at White House Pipeline Protest“).

And the energy story with the biggest climate implication was clearly Fukushima:

But the climate story that affects the most people around the world today by far is well described in this post — Oxfam: Extreme Weather Has Helped Push Tens of Millions into “Hunger and Poverty” in “Grim Foretaste” of Warmed World.

Climate Progress had been covering those who have been warning the day would come when humanity’s  unsustainable energy and agricultural policies would collide with global warming, who warned that the agricultural system we need to feed the world was built on a relatively stable climate that we are now destroying.  Lester Brown has been our Paul Revere on food insecurity (see the 2009 post Scientific American asks “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”).

We covered the emergence of this story last year:

But CP really dug in to this story starting in January, when food prices soared — see Extreme weather events help drive food prices to record highs — and I had lunch with Brown (see Washington Post, Lester Brown explain how extreme weather, climate change drive record food prices).

Brown’s work persuaded me that genuinely destabilizing food insecurity may occur as soon as this decade — assuming 1 billion undernourished people isn’t already a crisis.  So I decided to add a new category, “food insecurity,” and began a series of posts on food insecurity and the threat of Dust-Bowlification, which ultimately led the journal Nature to ask me to make the case that this was the gravest threat to humanity posed by climate change.  As my piece concluded:

“Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.”

Of course, it’s not just climate change that is driving food insecurity.  We have an “unsustainable surge in demand and not just ‘peak oil’, but ‘peak everything’,” as uber-hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, a self-described “die hard contrarian,” put it in a must-read analysis (see  “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever”).

Here’s the key chart:

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OR COMMENT


Grantham

Summary of the Summary:  The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value.  We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.

And we have a grotesquely unsustainable biofuels policy, as CP has long argued:

But it is climate change that threatens to turn large parts of the habited and arable land of the nation and the world into Dust Bowls, while at the same time driving extreme weather — heat waves and floods — that wreck havoc with crops around the world.

Lester Brown and Oxfam have been doing great work bringing attention to this issue.  And a number of reporters have been doing a good job of covering this story, notably the NY Times climate reporter, Justin Gillis.

And the scientific literature on the connection between global warming and extreme weather exploded this year:

My best effort to clearly lay out the problem is the Nature piece.  It had the benefit of multiple reviews by their editors, and I also got comments from five of the world’s leading authorities on climate change and drought and the hydrological cycle:  Kevin Trenberth, Aiguo Dai, Michael Mann, Peter Gleick and Jonathan Overpeck.

So I’m going to excerpt it below again [and regular readers need go no further].

I do not believe that most Americans — and that includes most policymakers and the media — understand the convergence of the recent scientific literature on the extreme threat posed directly to this country of Dust-Bowlification.

During the last Dust Bowl era, hundreds of thousands of American families fled the impacted regions. Now, those same type of arid conditions could stretch all the way from Kansas to California within the next forty years.  America’s financial future and the health and safety of our people are at serious risk if greenhouse gas pollution is not brought under control.  The food security of all of humanity is at risk. Denial is simply not an option, the time for action is now.

Here are some key excerpts:

Which impact of anthropogenic global warming will harm the most people in the coming decades? I believe that the answer is extended or permanent drought over large parts of currently habitable or arable land — a drastic change in climate that will threaten food security and may be irreversible over centuries.

A basic prediction of climate science is that many parts of the world will experience longer and deeper droughts, thanks to the synergistic effects of drying, warming and the melting of snow and ice.

Precipitation patterns are expected to shift, expanding the dry subtropics. What precipitation there is will probably come in extreme deluges, resulting in runoff rather than drought alleviation. Warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil, leading to a further increase in air temperature. That is why, for instance, so many temperature records were set for the United States in the 1930s Dust Bowl; and why, in 2011, drought-stricken Texas saw the hottest summer ever recorded for a US state. Finally, many regions are expected to see earlier snowmelt, so less water will be stored on mountain tops for the summer dry season. Added to natural climatic variation, such as the El Niño–La Niña cycle, these factors will intensify seasonal or decade-long droughts. Although the models don’t all agree on the specifics, the overall drying trends are clear.

I used to call the confluence of these processes ‘desertification’ on my blog, ClimateProgress.org, until some readers pointed out that many deserts are high in biodiversity, which isn’t where we’re heading. ‘Dust-bowlification’ is perhaps a more accurate and vivid term, particularly for Americans — many of whom still believe that climate change will only affect far-away places in far-distant times.

Prolonged drought will strike around the globe, but it is surprising to many that it would hit the US heartland so strongly and so soon.

The coming droughts ought to be a major driver — if not the major driver — of climate policies. Yet few policy-makers and journalists seem to be aware of dust-bowlification and its potentially devastating impact on food security. That’s partly understandable, because much of the key research cited in this article post-dates the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Raising public awareness of, and scientific focus on, the likelihood of severe effects of drought is the first step in prompting action.

I first heard of the risks in a 2005 talk by climatologist Jonathan Overpeck of the Uni- versity of Arizona in Tucson. He pointed to emerging evidence that temperature and annual precipitation were heading in oppo- site directions over many regions and raised the question of whether we are at the “dawn of the super-interglacial drought”.

The idea wasn’t new. As far back as 1990, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York projected that severe to extreme drought in the United States, then occurring every 20 years or so, could become an every-other-year phenomenon by mid-century.

Events are starting to bear out these worrying predictions. Snowpack reduction, early snowmelt and a decrease in dry-season river flow in the American West, forecast more than two decades ago, have now been measured. In much of the northern Rockies, the peak of the annual stream runoff is up to three or four weeks earlier than it was half a century ago.  Heat and drought — coupled with the greater impact of destruc- tive species, such as bark beetles, aided by warming — have increased forest die-off and the risk of wildfire.

The palaeoclimate record dating back to the medieval period reveals droughts lasting many decades. But the extreme droughts that the United States faces this century will be far hotter than the worst of those: recent decades have been warmer than the driest decade of the worst drought in the past 1,200 years.

And much warmer conditions are pro- jected. According to a 2009 report of the US Global Change Research Program, warming over mid-latitude land masses, such as the continental United States, is predicted to be higher than the forecast average global warming: much of the inland United States faces a rise of between 5 °C and 6 °C on the current emissions path (that is, ‘business as usual’) by the century’s end, with a substantial fraction of that warming occurring by mid-century.

A 2007 analysis of 19 climate projections estimated that levels of aridity comparable to those in the Dust Bowl could stretch from Kansas to California by mid-century. To make matters worse, the regions at risk of reduced water supply, such as Nevada, have seen a massive population boom in the past decade. Overuse of water in these areas has long been rife, depleting groundwater stores.

Of course, the United States is not alone in facing such problems. Since 1950, the global percentage of dry areas has increased by about 1.74% of global land area per decade. Recent studies have projected ‘extreme drought’ conditions by mid-century over some of the most populated areas on Earth—southern Europe, south-east Asia, Brazil, the US Southwest, and large parts of Australia and Africa. These dust-bowl conditions are projected to worsen for many decades and be “largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stopped”….

In the past six years, the Amazon has seen two droughts of the sort expected once in 100 years, each of which may have released as much carbon dioxide from vegetation die-off as the United States emits from fossil-fuel combustion in a year. More frequent wildfires also threaten to increase carbon emissions.

The key worry, as Climate Progress has spelled out this year, is food insecurity — how will we feed the world and where will people live if their land turns to dust:

Most pressingly, what will happen to global food security if dust-bowl conditions become the norm for both food-importing and food- exporting countries? Extreme, widespread droughts will be happening at the same time as sea level rise and salt-water intrusion threaten some of the richest agricultural deltas in the world, such as those of the Nile and the Ganges. Meanwhile, ocean acidification, warming and overfishing may severely deplete the food available from the sea….

Human adaptation to prolonged, extreme drought is difficult or impossible. Historically, the primary adaptation to dust-bowlification has been abandonment; the very word ‘desert’ comes from the Latin desertum for ‘an abandoned place’. During the relatively short-lived US Dust-Bowl era, hundreds of thousands of families fled the region. We need to plan how the world will deal with drought-spurred migrations (see page 447) and steadily growing areas of non- arable land in the heart of densely populated countries and global bread-baskets. Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.

These predictions are not worst-case scenarios: they assume business-as-usual greenhouse-gas emissions. We can hope that the models are too pessimistic, but some changes, such as the expansion of the subtrop- ics, already seem to be occurring faster than models have projected10. We clearly need to pursue the most aggressive greenhouse-gas mitigation policies promptly, and put dust-bowlification atop the world agenda.

That’s how the piece ended.

What does the future look like?  Dai laid it out in a 2010 study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, “Drought under global warming: a review,” the best review and analysis on the subject I’ve seen — see the figure below (click to enlarge, “a reading of -4 or below is considered extreme drought”):

drought map 3 2060-2069

The PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade (see here).

The large-scale pattern shown in Figure 11 [of which the figure above is part] appears to be a robust response to increased GHGs. This is very alarming because if the drying is anything resembling Figure 11, a very large population will be severely affected in the coming decades over the whole United States, southern Europe, Southeast Asia, Brazil, Chile, Australia, and most of Africa.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research notes “By the end of the century, many populated areas, including parts of the United States, could face readings in the range of -8 to -10, and much of the Mediterranean could fall to -15 to -20. Such readings would be almost unprecedented.”

For the record, the NCAR study merely models the IPCC’s “moderate” A1B scenario — atmospheric concentrations of CO2 around 520 ppm in 2050 and 700 in 2100.  We’re currently on the A1F1 pathway, which would takes us to 1000 ppm by century’s end, but I’m sure with an aggressive program of energy R&D we could keep that to, say 900 ppm.

The time to act is now.

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Related Food Insecurity Posts:

 

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21 Responses to Climate Story of the Year: Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security

  1. SecularAnimist says:

    Joe, thank you for your work to bring much needed attention to this subject.

    I must note, however, that it seems odd that an article about the impact of global warming on agriculture does not even mention the impact of agriculture on global warming — particularly, the impact of animal agriculture, which is estimated to account for 18 percent (FAO 2006) to 51 percent (WorldWatch 2009) of anthropogenic GHG emissions — in addition to its other detrimental environmental impacts and its huge consumption of grain for animal feed.

    • Joe Romm says:

      Good points. I haven’t actually written much on that. I’ll have to fix that in 2012. 51% is not plausible.

      • SecularAnimist says:

        Thanks for replying, Joe! I would very much like to see your analysis of the WorldWatch study.

      • Sailesh Rao says:

        Why is 51% “not plausible”?

        Livestock production uses nearly one-third of the ice-free land area of the planet. The energy conversion of plant-based foods to animal based foods occurs at an abysmal ratio of 26 to 1. That is, 100 Joules of phyto-mass energy is needed to produce just 3.8 Joules of animal foods such as meat, dairy and eggs. In Chapter 7 of the 2010 book, Energy and the New Reality, Vol 1, Prof. Danny Harvey of the University of Toronto notes that to supply the 4.1 ExaJoules of animal food energy that humans consume, a whopping 109 ExaJoules of phyto-mass energy is being used. In contrast, just 15.1 ExaJoules of plant foods is consumed directly or with minimal processing. As more and more people are demanding animal foods. the 26:1 conversion ratio is beginning to take its toll. Every two years, a Florida-sized area of the Amazon rainforest is being razed down and converted to agricultural and pastoral land to meet the growing demand for animal foods.

        The original 18% estimate from the UN (2006) did not take into account the recurring carbon cycle imbalances caused by the growing land use changes to accommodate livestock production. Goodland and Anhang (2009) attempted to correct for this omission in their Worldwatch report. Just to put this in perspective, Joseph Canadell from the Australian National University has stated (2011) that if we stopped deforesting today, the regenerating forests and soils would sequester half the anthropogenic carbon emissions.

        Rather than just stopping deforestation, imagine what could happen if we started returning land back to Nature instead of our current annual plan to deforest yet another Florida-sized chunk of the Amazon rainforest every two years!

        But unfortunately, we are dealing with a mass addiction among the well-to-do people on the planet, including environmentalists. Please take a look at http://climatehealers.ning.com/profiles/blogs/second-hand-diet
        for more on this issue.

    • Gingerbaker says:

      “…particularly, the impact of animal agriculture, which is estimated to account for 18 percent (FAO 2006) to 51 percent (WorldWatch 2009) of anthropogenic GHG emissions — in addition to its other detrimental environmental impacts and its huge consumption of grain for animal feed.”

      Statistics such as these are likely exaggerated if not hyperbolic – I would urge caution in regard to their accuracy.

      I learned a lot from this article at Richard Carrier’s new blog:

      http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/87

  2. Merrelyn Emery says:

    “assuming 1 billion undernourished people isn’t already a crisis.” Yes precisely.

    When will we genuinely acknowledge a ‘crisis’? When 50% of Americans or Australians are starving? ME

  3. Rabid Doomsayer says:

    “The current commodity prices are just part of the regular cycle”. Just from your graph above, hard to argue against. So if we have really high commodity prices we must be in a huge boom?

    Depressed world economy and high prices is what makes the graph scary. The next few years will be telling. Those who claim it is just a cyclical thing will be pressed to explain a continued increase.

    Multi decadal drought, mega drought. Prepare to use the terms.

  4. David B. Benson says:

    Drought conditions this fall here in (parts of) the Pacific Northwest.

  5. R Shamel says:

    Hey Joe,
    Glad to see you’re giving attention to this. We were forecasting that food would be the first item to hit the fan in the Q&A session after your talk in Portland, Maine a few years ago, when you didn’t see this.

    That’s not being said in an “I told you so” tone–just as a lead in to the rest of my comment, as someone who has been preparing commodity forecasts for many decades.

    WADR, I think Oxfam’s numbers are way too conservative. Their Figure 1 numbers will be blown out of the water this decade. We are headed for tough times within ten years.
    Warm regards,
    Roger

    • R Shamel says:

      By the way, thinking of our good friend Bill McKibben, who was nominated to be Time Magazine’s Man of the Year, among other honors, I’d just like to say that I don’t like this crazy planet Eaarth’s Christmas in New England: Here it is a few days before Christmas Eve–it’s traditionally cold, often snow-covered, and what do we have? Post-midnight temperatures in the mid-50s, with heavy rain and loud rumbling thunder.

      • Peter Mizla says:

        Autumn was very mild in Connecticut- we had that freak disaster snow event just before Halloween- then all of November was wet and mild- now a few days before Christmas 55 today with rain tonight.

        In my youth I remember late Decembers here, many very cold and some cold and snowy- that’s changing rapidly now. The Official reporting station for the state at Windsor Locks has lowered the average annual snow amounts from 47″ to 40″ – due to changes over the last 3 decades. The lone, last ski resort here is struggling this year.

  6. David B. Benson says:

    From an article in Der Spiegel Online: ‘Meanwhile, the German government has still not finalized plans for how it intends to generate enough energy to make up for the nuclear phaseout. A recent paper from the Economics Ministry in Berlin calls for the construction of “around 17 new large power plants” by 2022. “Fossil fuel-fired power plants are essential for a secure energy supply,” the paper reads.’ The Environment Minister disagrees about the fossil fuel requirement.

  7. A. Cook says:

    Most climate forecasting models are based on the Charney Sensitivity index. As we have seen these models are not keep up with observed changes. As David Wasdell et al’s upcoming paper point out, it is likely much to conservative. Moreover, basing policy on models based on the Charney Index are leading too apathy and disaster.

  8. catman306 says:

    Twenty degrees above normal in much of the country in December seems pleasantly mild.

    Twenty degrees above normal during the summer won’t be so kind.

    • Roger Blanchard says:

      Catman306,

      I monitor temperatures daily thoughout Canada and a few sites in the northern U.S. Averaged over the month of December through Dec 21, the highest anomalies relative to 1971-2000 averages are Iqaluit at +12.6 F (+7.0 C) and Yellowknife at +11.2 F (+6.2 C). Sault Ste. Marie, where I live, has only averaged +6.1 F (+3.4 C) this month. It has been very mild with almost no snow. There are some daily deviations that are +20 F (+11).

      It should be noted that the second half of the year has been extremely warm over much of northern North America. In Sault Ste. Marie, it appears that this will be the second warmest second half of the year going back to 1890. Three of the 4 warmest second halves have been from 1998 on. It should also be noted that this is not an El Nino year like the previous top second half years.

      Roger Blanchard

  9. Spike says:

    A study shows increasing tree deaths across the Sahel reflecting the effects of climate change there

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/20/climate-change-killing-trees-sahel

  10. John Tucker says:

    “Drought” associated with climate change also is sometimes not as noticeable due to rapid fluctuations but none the less can be more severe due to temperature spikes and humidity variations.

    Even when it is much shorter than historical droughts.

    I think a continent wide event like a uniform multi year dust bowl could actually be less likely with more severe regional events being prevalent.