California’s Drought Warning

Climate Crisis Hits Home

On July 8, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order calling on all Californians to voluntarily reduce their water use by 15%, and he expanded the regional drought state of emergency to include nine additional counties, for a total of 50 out of 58 counties.

“The realities of climate change are nowhere more apparent than in the increasingly frequent and severe drought challenges we face in the West and their devastating impacts on our communities, businesses and ecosystems,” Newsom said.

But, if anything, his actions seem to understate the situation.

Over 99% of land across nine Western states is currently abnormally dry, and almost 95% is covered by some category of drought —  the worst levels in the 21-year history of the U.S. Drought Monitor. And the weather driving it has been otherworldly.

In late June a massive record-breaking heatwave in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia pushed temperatures so high they shattered historical records — 112 degrees at Portland’s airport, 117 in Salem, and a nearly unbelievable 121.3 in Lytton, BC (the highest ever in Canada by 8 degrees), which was then destroyed by a wildfire.

Such high temperatures in a region totally unprepared for them led to hundreds of premature deaths — over 300 in British Columbia alone — and drew immediate attention from a group of climate scientists. They concluded it “would be virtually impossible without human-caused climate change,” on the order of a once-in-1,000 years event, but it “would occur roughly every 5 to 10 years in that future world with 2°C of global warming” — just 1.4 degrees F higher than today.

Yet, the same underlying mechanism — a “heat dome” — was responsible for similar triple-digit records in the Southwest just a few weeks earlier, and just nine days later Death Valley registered a world record 130 degrees — the day after Newsom’s announcement.

The next week, Western Europe was struck with the worst rainfall and floods in a century, with dozens killed and thousands initially reported missing. Many places reported more rain in one day than normally falls in a month — or even two — at the same time it was announced that a major section of the Amazon Basin had now become a net emitter of greenhouse gases, rather than part of the world’s largest absorber of them, as it has been throughout human history.

“These are examples for the context for thinking about drought and climate change — multiple extreme events coinciding around the globe, often breaking records,” environmental scientist LeRoy Westerling of University of California Merced told Random Lengths. “It’s that broader, global, interlinked pattern that is indicative of climate change.” Global warming doesn’t just mean hotter temperatures, but more extreme weather of all kinds, more variability, with increasing frequency.

“Yes we have seen drought in the past, and we will have wet years in the future,” he said, “but climate change is making the west more arid, by:

1) Increasing temperatures — increasing evaporation.

2) Average precipitation is not changing here significantly, so it cannot compensate for the increased evaporation — increasing aridity.

3) Increasing variability of precipitation means more wet and dry extremes within the broad trend towards intensifying aridity as we become more arid, and see more extremes in precipitation and temperature, we will experience with ever increasing frequency what we used to think of as extreme, impactful, but rare drought events. They are no longer rare, and what used to be considered extreme will quickly be eclipsed by even more extreme events.”

The wildfire threat could grow even faster, Westerling explained.

“Fire needs flammable fuels. Since we still get wet extremes, and still get similar precipitation on average, we still produce lots of new potential fuels,” he said. “The increasing aridity means they are flammable sooner, and for longer. So fire risk continues to increase.”

And the landscape itself will change.

“As the West becomes increasingly more arid, the kinds of vegetation it can support will change as well,” he explained. “Fire, beetles, and drought related mortality are some of the processes that are quickly rearranging the landscape to better reflect what the new climate can support.”

California’s most high-priced agriculture — Napa Valley red wines — already faces ruin from a quadruple threat, as the New York Times just reported: Direct loss to wildfire, grapes ruined by smoke, lack of water to irrigate, and loss of insurance. The last is ultimately the most devastating. Random Lengths first reported on the insurance problem of global warming 16 years ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The insurance industry depends upon knowing what is normal. But the old normal has been crumbling for decades, and there will be no “new normal.”

“The problem is that the climate will continue to change for the rest of our lives. So the situation on the ground will also be shifting rapidly,” Westerling warned. “That makes mitigation to moderate future climate change more important than ever, but it also makes adaptation both more important and more difficult.”

This only intensifies the need for scientific understanding.

“The only way we can get enough information about the future risks we need to plan for in building and protecting infrastructure, homes, and services like agriculture, carbon storage, water supply, habitat, recreation, forestry, etc., is with science-based observation, modeling, simulation and scenario analysis,” he explained.

“We are watching as accelerating climate change transforms the world around us in real time.”