So many forecasts for rain in the US West no longer develop. In recent years this scenario has become the rule, not the exception. The stated purpose for “solar radiation management” (SRM) is to block the sun with light scattering particles and thus to create as much atmospheric haze or cloud cover as possible (no matter how toxic that cloud cover is). Excessive atmospheric particulates cause profound disruptions to precipitation. All too often in recent years, rain that should have fallen in the US West has consistently been blocked by two primary means, atmospheric aerosol saturation and the “ridiculously resilient ridge” of constant high pressure that has been consistently maintained over the US West. This scenario has been used to keep the Eastern US cooled down at the cost of catastrophic drought and heat in the West.
The engineering of the “polar vortex” cool-downs of the Eastern US was repeated again and again during the winter of 2014-2015
This GISS global surface temperature map reflects “departure from average high temperatures” for a two year period from 2013 to 2015. The extremely anomalous below average temperatures stand out with glaring clarity in the eastern half of rhe North American continent
When moisture is allowed to flow over the West, it is commonly scattered by the jet aircraft aerosol spraying assault. This spraying creates too many cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). When the quantities of CCN’s are too high, moisture droplets cannot combine and fall as rain, thus the moisture just continues to migrate.
The images shown are the same, only different filters are used. The public is generally not shown any photos with enhanced infrared imaging as the clearly visible spraying would likely create great concern with the population which the power structure is trying desperately to avoid.
Geoengineering is causing catastrophic drought and fire activity. How consistently and aggressively have the climate engineers suppressed desperately needed precipitation from the US West? How much of the moisture that should have fallen in the West was blocked by engineered high pressure domes and/or migrated over the West to the East by constant and extensive aerosol spraying? The must see 1 minute video animation below clearly illustrates with shocking clarity the effects of the scenarios just described.
Video credit: Grace Raver/ NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
How catastrophic are the drought conditions in the Western US? The drought monitor map below shows conditions that are already unprecedented and getting worse by the day.
Do you remember when Detroit when bankrupt and President Obama refused to intervene in order to help Americans in a beleaguered American city? This was both baffling and maddening to the American people. After all, this “hope and change” President promised to fundamentally transform America. Little did we realize that the Detroit bankruptcy would open the floodgates to the total foreign control of American’s most precious resource, namely water, where the UN has gained a significant foothold in Detroit and its influence is spreading across the country. When Obama refused to help Detroit’s bankruptcy and its ensuing water crisis, subsequent UN involvement was a portend of what was coming.
Today, we see California on the verge of extinction because of the profound water shortage. Not to worry America, the United Nations has promised to intervene in all of America’s coming water crises. The U.N. High Commission on Human Rights special rapporteur on safe water and sanitation, Catarina de Albuquerque, is in possession of a mandate which dictates that it must directly intervene with the U.S. government, first in a confidential manner and then in a public manner. This is why Obama did not help the people of Detroit, as he was helping the UN establish a foothold in the United States when it comesto the control of our water supply. It is interesting that Obama would bail out GM, but not its host city, Detroit. Now we know why. The UN is interested in water, not automobiles, at least not in the present moment. Now the UN has turned its sights on California.
Detroit Is History and California Is Next
In yesterday’s article, I briefly touched upon the fact that California would experience a mass population exodus due to the artificially contrived water shortage. A few of the readers had trouble believing that the water situation was as grave as I stated in the previous article. Here is a chart that counters these misguided beliefs as it depicts the severity of the California drought.
What if California could not produce food, what impact would that have on the nation? California produces a sizable majority of American fruits, vegetables and nuts; 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots and the list goes on and on. A lot of this is due to California’s soil and climate.
“Lemon yields, for example, are more than 50 percent higher than neighboring states. California spinach yield per acre is 60 percent higher than the national average. Without California, supply of these products in our country and abroad would dip, and in the first few years, a few might be nearly impossible to find. Orchard-based products specifically, such as nuts and some fruits, would take many years to spring back.
Soon, the effect on consumer prices would become attention-grabbing. Rising prices would force Americans to alter their diets. Grains are locked in a complicated price-dependent relationship with fresh fruits, vegetables and meats. When the price of produce increases, people eat more grain. When the price of grain rises, people eat more fruits and vegetables. (In fact, in some parts of the world, wheat and rice are the only “Giffen goods” – a product in which decreasing prices lead to decreasing demand.) Young people and the poor in America, more than others, eat less fresh fruit when prices rise”.
It is not just California that is in danger of having very serious life-threatening water nd resulting food shortages. Please take a look at the following map
For those who believe in the coincidence theoriy of history, the following won’t mean much to you. However, to those who have taken off of your blinders as you have come to realize that there is an elite faction of powerful people who do engage in conspiratorial behavior to get what they want at any cost, please note the similarity between the above chart depicting widespread water shortages in the west and the original Jade Helm map featured below.
Only an avowed “coincidence theorist” could believe that there are not strong connections between Western water shortages, Jade Helm and Atzlan.
And there is more….
The UN Has Private Partners In Its Thirst for Control Over All Water
The infamous corporate raider and robber baron of the oil industry, T. Boone Pickens, is leading the charge to unscrupulously enrich himself as he leads the globalist depopulation efforts to create a series of artificially contrived water shortages. Pickens was one of the first to rush to capitalize on the impending water shortage by his insidious acquisition of the largest underground aquifer in the US, the Ogallala Aquifer, containing a quadrillion gallons of water, This massive underground reservoir extends from Texas to South Dakota.
In Roberts County, TX., Pickens has purchased nearly 70,000 acres, as well as the water rights to personally remove up to half of the Ogallala aquifer of which he plans to sell back to nearby residents in order to enrich himself. Much of this aquifer extends into prime farm land located in America’s bread basket. One man, T. Boone Pickens, is acquiring the ability to turn the American heartland into a dustbowl. Pickens will soon have the political power to charge so much for water, that farmers will be forced to abandon their farms and ranches in a Hunger Games rendition in which government sponsored interests will eventually become the sole purveyor of the nation’s food and water supply as the anti-humanist, Pickens, makes more money from water than he ever did with oil.
In order to acquire the water and expand his control over the Oglala Aquifer, Pickens needed more political power. In 2006, Pickens bought off the Texas State Legislature for $1.2 billion. This purchase of water-related law making power has allowed Pickens the ability to do accomplish four goals: (1) He created an eight-acre town and an accompanying local government, and subsequently made his tiny municipality into a powerful Water Supply District; (2) As such, Pickens automatically acquired the right to issue tax-free bonds and thereby, giving himself the lucrative benefit of borrowing at a tremendous discount; (3) Now operating as a public entity, Pickens is armed with the power of eminent domain which will allow him to expand his water acquisition potential in which he bullies local residents, along the aquifer, to sell their properties for pennies on the dollar; (4) Pickens used his 1.2 billion dollar bribe money to get the Texas legislature to pay for a 250 foot wide water pipeline corridor all the way to Dallas where Pickens will make an estimated yearly profit of $165 million at taxpayer expense. Pickens has become the poster child for the phrase “crony capitalism.”
Pickens told Business Week that he is only planning on selling surplus water, but according to the United Nations research and scientific studies report, nearly two-thirds of the entire population inhabiting the planet will face severe, life-threatening water shortages by the year 2025. So, Mr. Pickens, what surplus could you be talking about? And you only thought you had to worry about Obama collapsing the economy through his socialist policies.
T. Boone Pickens’ control over the water supplies through America’s heartland is only the tip of proverbial iceberg.
Nestle is Depleting the Great Lakes
There is a second front which is being used to create an artificial water shortage in the United States. Perrier, a subsidiary of the multi-national Nestle corporation, has invested heavily in Michigan and the Great Lakes. Locked behind two sets of chain link fence, huge siphoning pumps are deliberately hidden from view in the forest. They are pumping the Great Lakes dry and shipping the water overseas. Much of the Great Lakes water is headed for China, filled in massive cargo bags which are pulled across the ocean by a large supertanker.
By using a gaping loophole in the 2006 Great Lakes Compact, Obama’s appointees are allowing the Nestle Company to export precious fresh water out of Lake Michigan to the tune of an estimated $500,000 to $1.8 million per day profit. Obama’s Federal water managers are allowing the theft and subsequent export of our Great Lakes water out of our country across thousands of miles of oceans into the Asian basin plagued by huge population centers that are suffering from their constant lack of fresh water.
Nestle is not just taking water from the Great Lakes, they are contributing to the misery in California as Nestle is, today, in the midst of the California water crisis, draining California aquifers, from Sacramento alone taking 80 million gallons annually. Nestle then sells the people’s water back to them at a grealy inflated price and this is being done under dozens of brand names.
The Defense Intelligence Agency Warns the World
Even the Defense Intelligence Agency has clearly echoed the dire warnings of the United Nations report by stating that unstable water supplies will greatly impact all and water will subsequently be used as a weapon. The DIA report evoked a reaction from former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton,just prior to leaving office as she commented that the DIA’s findings are “sobering” and that as the world’s population continues to expand, the demand for water will increase but fresh water supplies will not keep pace and by the year 2025, the world will face catclysmic and very deadly water shortages. In yesterday’s article, I made the point that the technology exists to artifically create droughts as I revealed the series of Air Force documents known as “Air Force Owning the Weather 2025. Why is the year, 2025, figure so prominently into the dire forecasts of the globalists? I almost forgot that the CIA front group, Deagel, forecasted America’s population would slip to 65 million by the year 2025. My oh my, it is just raining coincidences.
Conclusion
I have written many articles about how past despots have used water and food as a weapon. If one controls water, one will control food. The United Nations, through The U.N. High Commission on Human Rights special rapporteur on safe water and sanitation, Catarina de Albuquerque, has asserted its authority under the guise of protecting human rights to assume control of an area which has severe water issues. Will Americans, one day, be forced to enter a camp to receive life-sustaining supplies?
At the end of the day, someone thinks that California will be abandoned. Consider what is happening with U-Haul prices:
“U-Haul Prices 6/18/15:
Denver to Los Angeles = $985
Los Angeles to Denver = $2,273
Difference: $1,288
Here’s another one:
Atlanta to Los Angeles: $1,112
Los Angeles to Atlanta: $3,582!!!
Difference: $2,470″
Somebody knows something. But apparently, Obama does not know enough because Time Magazine reported that he will golf Saturday on a lush, green course in California later today.
Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned. And it could be said that Obama golfed while America burned. This is a lot of coincidences to have been complied inside of only one article.
As Always – Do Your Research: (Although, if you have not noticed, quite a number of Hollywood star-types have been putting their CA properties on the market recently. What do they know?)
California property values collapse as water shut-offs begin… wealthy community to go dry in days… real estate implosion now inevitable
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
(NaturalNews) Water shut-offs have now begun in California, where government-ordered restrictions are starting to leave large communities high and dry. As CBS News is now reporting, the Mountain House community of 15,000 residents will run out of water in just a matter of days.
“The community’s sole source of water, the Byron-Bethany Irrigation District, was one of 114 senior water rights holders cut off by a curtailment notice from the state on Friday,” reports CBS.
And just like that, the property values of millions of dollars worth of homes belonging to 15,000 residents nosedives toward zero.
After all, what’s the value of a home that has no running water? California isn’t Africa… yet… so the idea of carrying your own buckets of water for bathing isn’t widely accepted.
Get ready for a real estate collapse in Collapsifornia
How many California homes and businesses are headed for a zero-water future? Many millions. How many Californians are aware of all this and already have their homes on the market so they can move somewhere else? A very small number… a tiny fraction of the total number of home and property owners invested there.
What these people are unfortunately not yet seeing is the catastrophic consequences of a continued drought and how it can utterly destroy the value of their property.
In that same article, I also foretold what’s going to happen next: plunging property tax revenues, municipal bankruptcies, a wave of climate refugees fleeing California and the collapse of the California economy. Unless rain starts falling out of the sky, all this is going to start unraveling like clockwork. (Count on it.)
“A number of water districts plan to sue the state on the grounds the State Water Resources Control Board has no legal authority to cut off some of California’s oldest and most protected water rights,” reports CBS. And so the water wars begin: there’s not enough water to go around, and the courtroom serves as the new battleground over a resource that the state of California has squandered for far too long.
The Collapsifornia real estate collapse has already begun
Just as I predicted in May, the collapse of real estate valuations in California is already well under way.
As the Washington Post now reports:
Rancho Santa Fe resident Randy Woods was feeling burdened by his lush landscape and opted to downsize. …The drought has dampened demand for large estates in San Diego County.
Woods said his girlfriend is among those struggling to sell. Her home boasts a yard designed by Kate Sessions, a well-known landscape architect and botanist who died in 1940. But now, the rare palm tree specimens, the secret garden and the turret-shaped hedges are a liability rather than a selling point.
Another friend, Woods said, has seen the value of his nine-acre plot plummet from $30 million to $22 million.
Did you read that correctly? A multi-million-dollar estate has lost over 25% of its value virtually overnight due to the issue of water. And this collapse in property prices is for properties that still have running water. What happens when the water supply to a $30 million estate is cut off? The value collapses to almost nothing. Who wants to live in a $30 million mansion and pay seven figures of property tax each year to the same California government that cuts off your water supply? Who wants to live like a third world refugee in a $30 million estate?
Nobody in their right mind, it turns out. Not even in California.
Freak out and get out, or be the last one holding worthless property
As this drought has unfolded, my message to Californians has been consistent and simple: freak out early and you might still be able to sell and leave. But if you delay, you’ll be among the last people holding near-worthless property.
This isn’t difficult to predict. As the sell-off begins, property valuations will plunge in an accelerated manner. (It has already begun.) The more water gets cut off by the government, the more desperate people will be to sell and leave. The term “motivated seller” will be ratcheted up to “panicked seller” and then finally “fire sale!”
People who buy the properties will soon be able to pick up once-prized real estate for dimes on the dollar. But it’s a gamble: If the rainfall comes back, property valuations may recover. And yet, according to nearly all the people who live in California right now, this drought is all caused by man-made global warming. And because I don’t see China shutting down its coal-fired power plants anytime soon, there’s no end to this drought if the climate change alarmists are correct.
Welcome to Delusionville, where the power of magical belief in Big Government can overcome any drought
California, it seems, is reverting back to a barren desert. Meanwhile, far too many of the people who live in California remain in a state of absolute denial over where this is all headed. Overall, I love California optimism, and many of my best friends live in California. But as anyone who lives in Los Angeles knows all too well, California is also the home of fantasyland dream weavers… people who live in their minds instead of reality. (Oh yeah, and I have a really awesome script I need you to read… it will change the movie industry forever!)
Delusional thinking is also a key trait of California’s political leadership. These are people who think money falls out of the sky and water runs uphill. They’ve recently even decided that California should cover the health care costs of the children of illegal immigrants.
And why not? If you’re going to live in Delusionville, you might as well dress it up with all the false hope and delusional wishes on your list: free health care for everyone, unlimited debt spending on entitlement programs, magical waterfalls of free H2O falling out of the clouds, and so on.
I once lived in Arizona, and many of the street names there envision concepts that are total fiction: Waterfall Lane, Great Spring Drive, Surging Rivers Rd. and so on. (Most of the rivers in Southern Arizona are bone dry riverbeds nearly all the time.) Wouldn’t it be great if California renamed its own streets and thoroughfares to match its own fantasies? Everything Is Free Hwy and Limitless Entitlements Drive seem especially fitting. Why not open a new swimming area called No Consequences Beach?
I think I’ll also take a long, meandering drive down If I Think It, It Must Be Real Highway, where “positive thinking” overpowers negative obstacles to such an amazing degree that you don’t even need to wear seatbelts or turn on your headlights.
Desalination is an environmental nightmare
For those who are saying, “There’s no water problem in California! It has the entire Pacific Ocean right next door!”, you need to look into the catastrophic environmental destruction tied to ocean water desalination.
Not only does desalination use fossil fuels which emit the very same carbon emissions that the California government insists caused the drought in the first place, the desalination process itself pollutes the ocean with high concentration salt brine that kills marine ecosystems and destroys ocean life along the California coastline.
And that’s on top of all the Fukushima radiation that’s already causing a marine ecosystem collapse in many areas of the coast. Add more salt brine to the mix and you get a state where rich, self-entitled Hollywood celebrities demand their lush, green lawns at the expense of ocean life, climate change and the global ecosystem. If that happens, California will lose all credibility as a “green” state, and its wealthiest residents will be living an ecological lie.
The new green, it turns out, is actually BROWN.
How dare we think ahead!
I fully realize it’s entirely evil of me to think ahead and point out what’s coming. There is no person more hated in modern society than someone who tells the truth. (Just ask Donald Trump, who’s now running for President by abandoning political correctness and stating the obvious.)
If you live in California and don’t have your own individual water supply — a private well that still works, large-scale rainwater collection in a rare area that still has rainfall, access to a private year-round stream, etc. — you either wake up to what’s coming or you get steamrolled by it.
Think of California as a jumbo jet that has just run out of fuel and is plummeting toward a mountain. You can either grab a parachute and bail out, or you can plug in your headphones and keep watching the in-flight Hollywood entertainment, pretending nothing bad is happening outside your immediate focus.
I know this isn’t the good news you wanted to hear. It’s much nicer to turn on the local TV and hear how Gov. Jerry Brown is going to brilliantly solve all of California’s problems by using the magic of wishful thinking and sleight-of-mind economic trickery. Meanwhile, in the real world, the taps are running dry, employers are fleeing the state’s high taxes, the almond orchards have shriveled into dust, the flood of non-citizen immigrants is draining the state’s revenues and property valuations are about to fall off a cliff.
Perhaps the California that has been promoted by socialist-minded propagandists can be recreated as a virtual reality destination for Oculus Rift fans, but in the real world, nobody wants to live in third-world conditions and drink their own recycled urine. Not even Ed Begley, Jr., and he’s a pretty cool dude who’s willing to do almost anything to save the planet.
Hence the coming wave of recently-bankrupt California climate refugees who will flood into neighboring states seeking water, low-cost housing and free entitlements. That’s not gonna win friends in neighboring states, trust me. If you’re living in California right now, I urge you to strongly consider where things are really headed and start making a realistic list of your options.
Margaret and I have just returned from a trip to beautiful Lake Shasta in Northern California. Well … it was “more” beautiful a few years ago. This year we actually walked on the bottom of the lake in knee-high water. The drought has lowered the lake’s normal water line over 150 feet from previous years. Seventy percent of the lake’s capacity has dried up due to California’s severe drought.
The fact that California is running out of water and that its contribution to the country’s food economy, which represents 53% of the US food source, is not existent, has received only minor attention in the news. Accordingly, the mass media news organizations collectively decide not to publish negative stories to which they feel the public cannot alter or actively make a response. This is the old “ostrich with its head in the sand” approach to global problems.
This “for our own good news blackout” strategy specifically applies to stories on the planet’s 6th mass extinction, a planetary upheaval we are now facing. The extinction process has profound influence on the current state of our world (see news article attached below). However, the fact is that we CAN collectively alleviate this impending devolution process, for science has recognized that human behavior is the primary cause behind today’s extinction.
This month’s news video provides some positive insights into our ability to forestall the mass extinction so that we may be able to offer our children, grand children and future generations a world in which they can thrive.
With Love and Light,
Bruce
Scientists Warn We Are Approaching The Next Mass Extinction
July 25, 2014 | by Justine Alford
Photo credit: Mary Harrsch. “Southern White Rhinocerous looks us over at Wildlife Safari
near Winston Oregon,” via Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
The decline of various animal populations and species loss are occurring at alarming rates on Earth, contributing to the world’s sixth mass extinction. While these deadly events may ultimately pave way for the emergence of new species, Stanford scientists have warned that if this “defaunation” that we are currently experiencing continues, it will likely have serious downstream impacts on human health. The study has been published in Science.
Biodiversity on Earth is extremely rich at present; it’s estimated to be the highest in the history of life on our planet. But scientists have been recording species abundance and population numbers for some time now and it is evident that we are experiencing a sharp downward trend. While the extinction of a species is normal and occurs at a natural “background” rate of around 1-5 per year, species loss is currently occurring at over 1,000 times the background rate.
Thanks to the fossil record, we are very familiar with large extinction events. Indeed, there have been 5 mass extinctions throughout the history of life on Earth, but there is a key difference between these past events and what is happening presently: humans are almost entirely to blame for the current mass extinction. Climate change, pollution, deforestation and overharvesting are all contributing factors. While it’s difficult to be certain of the causes of the previous mass extinctions, they have been attributed to natural events such as supervolcano eruptions and asteroid strikes.
By reviewing literature and analyzing various data sets, scientists have found that since 1500, 322 terrestrial vertebrates have become extinct. The remaining species are also suffering a 25% average decline in abundance. Invertebrates are also experiencing a huge blow with 67% of monitored populations showing 45% average abundance decline.
Among vertebrate species, it is estimated that up to 33% are threatened or endangered. Large animals, or megafauna, seem to be most affected, mirroring past mass extinctions. This is because large animals tend to have low population growth rates, produce few offspring and require large habitats to sustain viable populations.
Loss of megafauna has various downstream effects and may eventually impact human health. For example, studies conducted in Kenya where patches of land were isolated from large animals such as zebras and elephants found that the areas rapidly became plagued with rodents due to increases in food availability and shelter. Concomitantly, the levels of disease causing pathogens that they carry also increases, thus enhancing the risk of disease transmission to humans.
But it’s not just big animals that have an impact. Various insect species such as bees are valuable pollinators. According to a Cornell study, honeybees and other insects contributed $29 billion to farm income in the US in 2010. Furthermore, insects also play pivotal roles in nutrient cycling and decomposition, contributing to ecosystem productivity.
Lead author Rodolfo Dirzo hopes that raising awareness of the consequences of this ongoing mass extinction may stimulate much needed change, but acknowledges that solutions are far from simple given that approaches need to be tailored to individual areas and situations.
[Header image, “Southern White Rhinocerous looks us over at Wildlife Safari near Winston Oregon,” by Mary Harrsch, via Flickr, used in accordance with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]
Record May heat sent temperatures soaring above 100° in much of Southern California on Wednesday, and fierce Santa Ana winds fanned fires that scorched at least 9,000 acres in San Diego County, forcing thousands to evacuate. For the second consecutive day, the Los Angeles Airport set a record for the hottest May temperature since record keeping began in 1944. Wednesday’s 96° beat the record set on Tuesday of 93°. Other all-time May record heat was recorded at Camarillo (102°) and Oxnard (102°) on Wednesday. In Downtown Los Angeles, the mercury hit 99° on Wednesday, falling short of the all-time May record is 103° set on May 25, 1896. More record heat is forecast on Thursday, and hot offshore Santa Ana winds will bring extreme fire danger.
Figure 1. A firenado in Fallbrook, California at old Highway 395 and Interstate 15 on May 14, 2014. Image credit: Jena Rents via Twitter.
Figure 2. True-color MODIS satellite image of fires burning in Southern California and Northern Mexico on Wednesday afternoon, May 14, 2014. Image credit: NASA.
100% of California in severe to exceptional drought
Today’s U.S. Drought Monitor report showed grim news for California: 100% of the state is now in severe or higher drought, up from 96% the previous week. Though just 25% of California is classified as being in the highest level of drought, “Exceptional”, Erin McCarthy at the Wall Street Journal estimates that farms comprising 53% of California’s $44.7 billion market value lie in the Exceptional drought area. Averaged state-wide, the Palmer Drought Severity Index during April 2014 was the second worst on record, behind 1977. For the 12-month period ending in April, drought conditions in California for 2013 – 2014 were also the second most severe on record, slightly below the 2008 – 2009 drought. To break the drought, most of the state needs 9 – 15″ or precipitation to fall in one month. This amounts to more than a half-year’s worth of precipitation for most of the state.
Figure 3. The May 13, 2014 U.S. Drought Monitor showed 100% of California in severe or higher drought, with 25% of the state in the highest level of drought, “Exceptional.” Image credit: U.S. Drought Monitor.
California’s rainy season is over
The California October through April rainy season is now over. Between October 2013 and April 2014, the state received 10.44″ of precipitation, which is just 51% of average for the period, and the third lowest such total on record. Going back to 1895, the record low mark was set in 1976 – 1977, when the state got just 34% of its average rainy season precipitation. California typically receives less than 10% of its annual precipitation between May and September, and the coming hot and dry summer in combination with a severely depleted Sierra snowpack will cause a severe fire season and significant agricultural damages. The fifth and final snow survey of the season on May 1 found that the statewide snowpack’s water content–which normally provides about a third of the water for California’s farms and cities–was only 18% of average for the date. Already, the 2014 drought has cost the state at least $3.6 billion in agricultural damages, the California Farm Water Coalition estimates. CAL FIRE recently announced it had hired 125 additional firefighters to help address the increased fire threat due to drought conditions.
California’s first significant snow storm of 2014 hit the Sierras on Wednesday and Thursday, dumping up to 2 feet of snow, with a melted water equivalent of up to two inches. However, this modest snowstorm was not enough to keep the Sierra snowpack from recording its lowest snow amounts in more than 50 years of record keeping during Thursday’s Sierra Snow Survey. The survey found a snow pack that was only 12% of normal for this time of year. Until Thursday, the lowest statewide snowpack measurement at this time of year was 21% of average, in 1991 and 1963, according to the Los Angeles Times. Since snowpack in the Sierras forms a crucial source of water for California, the dismal snow survey results are a huge concern.
Figure 1. Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Survey Program for the Department of Water Resources, walks leaves a snow covered meadow after the second snow survey of the year near Echo Summit, Calif., Thursday, Jan. 30, 2014. Despite the overnight snow storm the survey showed the snow depth at 12.4 inches with a water content of only 1.4 inches for this location at this time of the year. Gehrke said that while the recent snow fall will help, it is not enough to impact the water supply.(AP Photo)
The forecast: little drought relief in sight
One of the most persistent and intense ridges of high pressure ever recorded in North America has been anchored over the West Coast since December 2012. While the ridge has occasionally broken down and allowed low pressure systems to leak though, these storms have mostly brought spotty and meager precipitation to California, resulting in California’s driest year on record during 2013. January 2014 could well be its driest January on record. The ridge inevitably builds back after each storm, clamping down on any moisture reaching the state. Since rain-bearing low pressure systems tend to travel along the axis of the jet stream, these storms are being carried along the axis of the ridge, well to the north of California and into Southeast Alaska, leaving California exceptionally dry. The latest runs of the GFS and European models show that the ridge is now building back, and it appears likely that California will see no significant precipitation until at least February 7. A weak upper level low will move along the coast on Sunday and spread some light rain along the immediate coast, but this precipitation will generally be less than 0.25″–too little to have any significant impact on the drought. The ridge will not be as intense when it builds back, though, which gives me some hope that a low pressure system will be able to break the ridge by mid-February and bring the most significant rains of the winter rainy season to California.
Worst California drought in 500 years?
UC Berkeley paleoclimatologist B. Lynn Ingram, author of “The West Without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow”, said in an interview, “this could potentially be the driest water year in 500 years.” Her research on tree rings shows that California has not experienced such an extreme drought since 1580. “If you go back thousands of years, you see that droughts can go on for years if not decades, and there were some dry periods that lasted over a century, like during the Medieval period and the middle Holocene. The 20th century was unusually mild here, in the sense that the droughts weren’t as severe as in the past. It was a wetter century, and a lot of our development has been based on that.” It’s no wonder, then, that the overall agricultural impact of the drought could reach $1 billion this year, according to the Fresno-based Westlands Water District.
California’s drought woes are part of an on-going 14-year Western U.S. drought that began in 2000, and peaked between 2000 – 2004. A 2012 study titled, Reduction in carbon uptake during turn of the century drought in western North America, found that the 2000 – 2004 drought was the most severe Western North America event of its kind since the last mega drought over 800 years ago, during the years 1146 – 1151. The paper analyzed the latest generation of climate models used for the 2013 IPCC report, which project that the weather conditions that spawned the 2000 – 2004 drought will be the new normal in the Western U.S. by 2030, and will be considered extremely wet by the year 2100. If these dire predictions of a coming “megadrought” are anywhere close to correct, it will be extremely challenging for the Southwest U.S. to support a growing population in the coming decades.
Megadroughts in the Western U.S. can develop from natural causes, as well, and the current pattern of cooler than average ocean temperatures in the Eastern Pacific and warmer than average ocean temperatures in the Atlantic increase the odds of drought conditions like the ones we have seen during the current megadrought. Edward Cook, director of the Tree Ring Laboratory at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., said at a presentation last month at the American Geophysical Union meeting that tree ring data show that the area of the West that was affected by severe drought in the Medieval period was much higher and much longer than the current drought. It is “indeed pretty scary,” Cook said. “One lasted 29 years. One lasted 28 years. They span the entire continental United States.” Two megadroughts in the Sierra Nevada of California lasted between 100 and 200 years. Bobby Magill at Climate Center has more on Dr. Cook’s presentation in a post, Is the West’s Dry Spell Really a Megadrought?
Figure 3. Normalized precipitation over Western North America (five-year mean) from 22 climate models used to formulate the 2013 IPCC report, as summarized by Schwalm et al., 2012, Reduction in carbon uptake during turn of the century drought in western North America. The horizontal line marks the precipitation level of the 2000 – 2004 drought, the worst of the past 800 years. Droughts of this intensity are predicted to be the new normal by 2030, and will be considered an outlier of extreme wetness by 2100. The paper states: “This impending drydown of western North America is consistent with present trends in snowpack decline as well as expected in-creases in aridity and extreme climate events,including drought, and is driven by anthropogenically forced increases in temperature with coincident increases in evapotranspiration and decreases in soil moisture. Although regional precipitation patterns are difficult to forecast, climate models tend to underestimate the extent and severity of drought relative to available observations. As such, actual reductions in precipitation may be greater than shown. Forecasted precipitation patterns are consistent with a probable twenty-first century megadrought.” Image credit: Schwalm et al., 2012, Reduction in carbon uptake during turn of the century drought in western North America, Nature Geoscience 5, 551-555, Published online 29 JULY 2012, DOI: 10.1038/NGEO1529, www.nature.com/naturegeoscience.
If There’s Global Warming…Why Is It So Cold?
It’s been top-ten coldest January on record in the Upper Midwest, and much colder than average over much of the Eastern U.S. However, the that isn’t the case over other portions of the globe, including the Western U.S. and Alaska. Wunderground’s weather historian Christopher C. Burt analyzes the situation in his latest post, How Cold has this January been in the U.S.? He concludes, “this January’s average temperature nationally has probably been close to normal since the western half of the nation has been almost as much above average as the eastern half was below average. The only region that will most likely have experienced a TOP 10 coldest January will be the Upper Midwest.” In the U.S., only four stations set all-time low minimum temperature records in January, compared to 34 that set all-time high maximum temperature records. I’ve been monitoring global temperatures this month, and it appears likely that January will rank between the 5th and 15th warmest January since record keeping began in 1880. Of particular note were the amazingly warm January temperatures in the Balkans. According to weather record researcher Maximiliano Herrera, “over 90% of all stations in the Balkans from Slovenia to Croatia to Bosnia to Serbia To Montenegro to Kosovo etc., have DESTROYED their previous record of warmest January ever (many locations have 100 – 200 years of data.) In many cases the monthly temperatures were 7 – 9°C (13 – 16°F) above average, and the new records were 3 – 4°C above the previous record. This is for THOUSANDS of stations, almost all of them. In Slovenia, for example, Mount Kredarica is the only station in the whole country not to have set its warmest January on record.”
Video 1. If There’s Global Warming … Why Is It So Cold? The latest video from climate videographer Peter Sinclair on the Yale Climate Forum website demonstrates that while it was a very cold January in the Midwest, this has been counterbalanced by record warmth over the Western U.S. and Alaska, caused by an unusually extreme kink in the jet stream.
Links Another Unexpected Disaster That Was Well Forecast. Based in Atlanta, TWC’s Bryan Norcross concludes that “WARM GROUND + VERY COLD AIR + SNOW + WORKDAY = CHAOS. If the decision-makers understood the formula above, this information should have been sufficient to trigger a proper response.”
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Margaret and I have just returned from a trip to beautiful Lake Shasta in Northern California. Well … it was “more” beautiful a few years ago. This year we actually walked on the bottom of the lake in knee-high water. The drought has lowered the lake’s normal water line over 150 feet from previous years. Seventy percent of the lake’s capacity has dried up due to California’s severe drought.
