DROUGHT AND ENERGY
SALADACRES
DROUGHTS AND GLOBAL WARMING
BIG DROUGHTS HAVE STARTED
PREDICTIONS ON HEATING AND DROUGHT
MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD
A RECORD OF DROUGHTS AND FAMINES
CONSEQUENCES OF GLOBAL WARMING
THE NEED AND DEMAND FOR NEW FOOD SOURCES
DROUGHTS AND GLOBAL WARMING
Evidence now shows that drought is the silent and insidious killer associated with global warming. Millions of people were casualties of drought in the past, not including unwritten history (1)(2). This section on Drought is the big picture. It is a factual account of past events and future trends. It indicates locations for projects and the opportunities to sell to markets whose traditional suppliers have ‘dried up.’
PREDICTIONS ON HEATING AND DROUGHT
Our current warming is a fact, and is a steady and well documented trend, with no downward curve in sight. And unlike the situation a millennium ago, humans are numerous enough, and our outputs profuse enough, to push the trend further and faster. Economists, business, and banks worship “growth”; but this thinking will wind up killing billions of people.
Today we are experiencing sustained warming of a kind unknown since the last ice age – its also faster. This warming is bringing drought. Water shortages will happen that will challenge even small cities, to say nothing of thirsty metropolises like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Tuscon. Much of the Western U.S. is living on borrowed time. Cities will parch – preceded by competition and violence, and followed by death and migration. But to where? The earth’s population is 6.8 billion and growing. The cage is getting tighter.
The greatest impact of intensifying drought, will be on people already living in semiarid lands. In North America this is California, the Great Basin states between the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains (parts of California, Utah, Oregon, Utah, and Idaho, and nearly all of Nevada), and Mexico. In the world, there are a billion people in 110 countries living in semiarid countries. Relatively few people die of hunger during a drought. They perish from epidemics of dysentery and other diseases spread by poor living conditions. For example, 1.6 million children a year die today because of a lack of access to good sanitation and clean drinking water.
The long term future is alarming. A study by Britain’s authoritative Hadley Centre for Climatic Change documents a 25% increase in global drought during the 1990’s, which produced well documented population losses. The Hadley’s computer models of future aridity resulting from the impacts of man made greenhouse gas emissions are truly frightening. At present, extreme drought affects 3% of the earth’s surface and moderate drought 25% of the earth's surface. If the warming trend continues extreme drought will advance to 30% and moderate drought 50% of the earth's surface. The constant rise of C02 in the atmosphere indicates no slowing of the heating trend. C02 levels are now at 380 ppm in the atmosphere, the highest since the last ice age 10,000 years ago. Between 400-500 ppm the ice caps will melt and the Greenland ice sheet will melt, raising sea levels.
The UN Environment Program reports that 450 million people in 29 countries currently suffer from water shortages. By 2025, this will be 2.8 billion people living in aeas with increasing scarce water resources. 20% of the world’s population currently lacks access to safe, clean drinking water.
California agriculture is withering. Line ups to the food bank in Fresno California are a kilometer (.6 mile) long. Unemployment in Fresno is 40% and the state of California is broke and can’t help.
MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD
Medieval Warm Period; Why Refer to It?
Between the years 900 and 1400, temperatures were a few degrees warmer in some parts of the world, notable parts of China, Europe, and western North America. The warmer centuries meant less rain, not more.
There is enough data about the period 1000 years ago to look back and see what a slight warming did to climate. The experience of the Medieval Warming Period tells that the silent and often ignored killer is drought, even during a period of mild warming. We are repeating the climate warming that was experienced between years 900 – 1400, but with the added accelerant of green house gases in the atmosphere.
Today’s global warming parallels the warming in the Medieval Warming Period. The famines and disasters that occurred 1000 years ago happened when the global populations were much smaller. If the same warming happened today, it would impact billions more people.
Also, the experience of the Medieval Warm Period shows how drought can destabilize a society and lead to its collapse. Cities were much smaller then, with populations in the 10’s of thousands, and not millions. People could move to other locations to escape; whereas people today are often trapped. Every habitable place is crowded. In the past, the consequences of drought were the disintegration of the ability to tax and impose law and order. The people dispersed into subsistence farming villages of a thousand years before. These were sustainable, and allowed people to live.
Medieval Warm Period – Hero and Villain
In the Medieval Warming Period the warming resulted in warmer winters and longer summers, and temperature differences never amounted to more than a few degrees. Nor was everywhere necessarily warmer. In the eastern Pacific (California), the same centuries were cool and dry. These were times of sudden, unpredictable climate swings, and above all, drought. The higher temperatures, and accompanying shifts in rainfall patterns rippled across the globe, bringing both opportunity and catastrophe. While Europe basked in summer warmth and the the Norse sailed far West, much of humanity suffered through heat and prolonged droughts. A huge swath of the world, from much of North America, through Central and South America, and far across the Pacific to India and Northern China, experienced long periods of aridity. Drought cycles settled over the Saharan Sahel, the Nile Valley, and eastern Africa, creating havoc. Farmers went hungry, civilizations collapsed, and cities imploded. Archaeology and climatology tell that drought was the silent killer, a harsh reality that challenged human ingenuity to the limit.
This period tells us how humans adapted to climatic crisis. Also, it warns us that lengthy droughts happen when warming occurs. We are entering an era when extreme aridity will affect a large portion of the world’s population which is now much higher population and the challenges of adapting are much more complex
A RECORD OF DROUGHTS AND FAMINES
The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has caused famine droughts in India and China by stopping the monsoon rains. El Nino events are caused by a reverse of the trade winds in the equatorial Pacific. Easterly trades push warm water against South America. This changes the monsoon patterns in India and China. The ENSO has set up many droughts during and after the Medieval Warming Period that resulted in famines. For example, 20 – 30 million tropical farmers perished as a result of droughts during the 19th century. So far the ENSO is unpredictable, and when it happens, it shows the devastation that a change in rainfall can cause.
The reason for the following list of famines, is to bluntly show that droughts kill, and it will happen again. In the 21st century, we think our technology will save us; but the truth is, drought is happening on a bigger scale and irrigation systems, and pipelines and canals to cities will fail on a bigger scale. China for example, is even more vulnerable today, as is the Western U.S. and Mexico.
Droughts: China
In China, 19th century droughts were of epochal proportions and magnified by political unrest.
> 1877-79, a third of the population of Shaanxi Province died of hunger and related famine
> 1899 -1901 brought another savage drought when more than a million out of a population of 8.5 million died. No rain fell. In a few weeks the price for a bushel of wheat went up 15 fold. Wells and rivers dried up, and the country became a desert. As their fields dried up, thousands of farmers moved into Xi’an (the Chinese capital before Bejing) – 300,000 of them during 1900-01 alone. The governor forbade them to come within the city walls, so they camped in caves dug into the riverbanks and in the fields. They ate coarse grass and weeds and died in their blackened caves. Dysentery and cholera followed in the wake of famine because the remaining water was contaminated with sewage. Nicols (an American correspondent) reported that cannibalism became inevitable. “A horrible kind of meatball, made from the bodies of human beings who had died of hunger, became a staple article of food, that was sold for the equivalent of about 4 American cents per pound.
The authorities received funding from Bejing and set up soup kitchens, but the main problem was a lack of local food to feed the starving. Entire families subsisted on horsemeat, cats, and dogs, and then starved to death. The vast plain was silent. No farmers were in the fields; the plain was silent because its inhabitants were dead.
> 1907 - 24 million people died in the famine
> 1941-42 - 3 million died in the famine
Droughts: India
ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) shifts in the southwestern Pacific in the warm centuries (900-1400) effected the monsoons which brought water every summer to India. There must have been occasional serious, and long forgotten periods of drought caused hunger. We only have the testimony of later centuries to inform us.
In describing northern India, the 16th century Mughal emperor Babur wrote that villages and even towns “were depopulated and set up again in a moment! If the people of a large town, one inhabited for years even, flee from it, they do it in a way that not a sign or trace of them remains in a day or a day and a half. On the other hand, if they fix their eyes upon a place in which to settle, they need not dig watercourses, or construct dams because their crops are all rain grown.”
One reason for the high casualty rates in India: until the 18th century, most of India relied on high risk “dry” agriculture with no irrigation works.
> 1344-45 - a severe famine that even royalty starved
> 1629 - depopulation of entire villages
> 1630 - depopulation of entire villages; millions of people and their cattle perished. Cholera epidemics from drinking scarce polluted water carried away whole villages.
> 1685 - 88 – another major drought
> 1770 - the Great Hunger depopulated and ravaged a third of Bengal
> 1779 - another monsoon failure and starvation
> 1790 - intense and varied droughts that also effected Australia, Mexico, and southern Africa
> 1792 - 600,000 people starved in northern Madras state; the dead and dying blocked the streets of Calcutta.
> 1965-67 - 1.5 million people died in famine
Bangaluru (formerly Bangalore) is a typical city in south India approaching 8 million. People are migrating to the city from the country. Newcomers to the city recently sold their land and are momentarily well off. But they, like many others in the city are dependent on water trucks for their water. Groundwater is pumped into thousands of trucks each day in the country and trucked to the city. Farmers find it more profitable to sell the water rather than grow food. The water table dropped 13' in 2009. In 1975 there were 70,000 electric pumps pulling out groundwater. In 2010, there are about 30 million. Its a race to see who gets to the bottom of the aquifer first. With a monsoon failure or disruption by ENSO (resulting in an El Nino) in 2010 or 2011 there will be a famine.
Droughts: U.S.
> 1934-40 - the Dust Bowl droughts of the Great Plains caused 3.5 million people to leave the land
> 1950 -56 - this drought ruined many farmers, and reduced crop yields by as much as 50%
> 1987-89 - drought covered 36% of the U.S., less than 70% caused by the Dust Bowl
Droughts: Russia
> 1921-22 – 225,000 to 5 million people died in the Ukraine and Volga regions
Pending Droughts
Great Plains
The Great Plains are irrigated by the Ogallala underground aquifer which in turn is replenished by runoff from the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. It consists of 6 large underground lakes that total the size of Lake Huron. The Ogallala is under the states of Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. It is being sucked dry for irrigation at the rate of 42 billion gallons a year. Each irrigation pivot sucks up 1,000 gallons per minute. When the aquifer runs out, the lack of irrigation water combined with climate warming will cause these states to turn back to dry, semiarid grassland. The corn, wheat, and soybeans will disappear. 40% of the grains exported by the U.S come from Ogallala water. Countries depend on this food to live. What happens to them when the Ogallala runs dry in 2020?
Colorado River
The river begins as snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains and is fed by a series of tributaries. The Colorado River winds its way south for 1,400 miles and empties into the Gulf of California. Seven western states and Mexico share the water, which serves about 25 million people. You can throw a rock across the river in some places. The competition for the water is fierce and global warming will lessen its flow. The Colorado delta, once rich tidal marshes larger than Florida’s Everglades are now devoid of water. Its been replaced with sand, gravel, and garbage.
CONSEQUENCES OF GLOBAL WARMING
Climate is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks by pouring billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. C02 levels are at an all time high at 380 ppm and nearing the catastrophic tipping point between 400 to 500 ppm when the ice caps will melt. We have entered a time of sustained warming, which dates back to at least 1860, propelled in large part by greenhouse gases, from the burning of fossil fuels by humans (anthropogenic warming). Scientific evidence shows that humans are causing a much warmer world and this is now beyond the stage of controversy. We must now grapple the problems of rising sea levels, reducing pollutants, and melting glaciers that feed rivers for irrigation and drinking water.
Even a small amount of planetary warming alters and redistributes weather across the world. Arid and semiarid areas are becoming drier. Now we are entering a period of sustained warming with millions of people already at risk, living as they do on marginal lands, or, in the case of Arizona, Nevada and California, in huge cities that raid water from distant rivers and aquifers on a mega scale.
Future wars will be fought over water. With warming accelerating, the stakes are much higher. We transport and use water on an industrial scale. The reservoirs are bigger, but the useage volumes are just as just as big. Water reserves are being looted. Hence, bigger catastrophes with no recovery. Mega plundering means a mega fall – it’s a law of sustainability.
We wrap ourselves in the security blanket of technology, and short memories, saying that drought and famine will not happen to us. But droughts are happening now and a few more canals, pipelines and pumps won’t fix it. If there is no water, canals and pipes are useless, as is money for food in times of famine.
Food Crisis - Now
In the last 40 years food supplies have grown faster than population. But there are still huge numbers of food insecure people in the world. Today, 791 million people, or 18 percent of the population of developing countries, are food insecure.
However, food production will need to rise by nearly two thirds in the developing world over the next 30 years. But, most land suited to agriculture is already cultivated! How is this supposed to happen! More than half the world's groundwater supplies are already saline, and the proportion is increasing as demand for water outstrips supply.
By 2030, UNESCO estimates the world will need 55% more food, which translates into a growing demand for irrigation, which already claims 70% of all fresh water consumed by humans. Then there is the huge increase in the urban population. Estimates are that by 2030, 2/3’s of humanity will be urban dwellers, and 2 billion will live in squatter settlements and slums.
Food imports are the importing of virtual water. If a country can't feed itself then it will go into debt by importing food. Their bonds turn to junk and allied countries are reluctant to help
The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria estimates that by 2010, around 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, nearly a 1/3 of the population, will suffer from malnutrition because of intensifying drought. The number of food emergencies in Africa each year has almost tripled since the 1980’s with 1 in 3 people across sub Saharan Africa being malnourished. The Nigerian institute’s projection for 2010 is just the beginning. Future drought related catastrophes will make these preliminaries seem trivial and could affect more than ½ of Africa’s population.
THE NEED AND DEMAND FOR NEW FOOD SOURCES
Nobel prize winner Henry Kendall and population dynamics expert David Pimentel have shown that humanity is exceeding the Earth's capacity to support us. Now, we either use, co-opt or destroy 40% of the estimated 100 billion tons of organic matter produced annually by the terrestrial ecosystem. This is driving to extinction many other organisms which keep the planet habitable.
Three different scenarios are considered:
1) Pessimistic: population climbs to 13 billion people and the worst cases of global warming, starvation, population friction and violence, unbelievable debt.
2) Business as usual: population rises to 10 billion; soil erosion, salinization and waterlogging from increased rainfall all rise; no increase for aid in developing countries, no action to reduce global warming or ozone levels.
3) Optimistic: population stabilizes at 7.8 billion, energy intensive agriculture expanded; soil and water conservation improves; developed countries increase financial aid and technology; food is more equitably distributed, diets shift from animal to plant protein.
The optimistic scenario would involve the following:
1) Expand irrigation by 20%
2) Amount of potassium, nitrogen, phosphate, and other fertilizers expanded by 450%
3) Food production is tripled
4) All people become vegetarians
5) Energy intensity in agriculture is increase 50 to 100 fold
Projections in 2008, state that by 2030, 8.3 billion people will walk the Earth, and farmers will have to grow 30% more grain (4).
This optimistic scenario, Kendall and Pimentel state, "appears to be unrealistic". Furthermore, "the human race now appears to be getting close to the limits of global food productive capacity based on present technologies. A major reordering of world priorities is prerequisite for meeting the problems we now face."
WATER
In a special issue of the National Geographic, in April 2010, it note that "Water is the earth's most vital resource. How we use and reuse it will help define the future of our planet".
Steven Solomon, in his book Water, (published in 2010) notes on page 373; "In the first decade of the 21st Century, an astonishing number of nations were so critically water stressed that they can no longer grow all the crops they need to feed and clothe their own populations. Growing crops is an astonishingly water intensive enterprise - about 3/4 of mankinds water use worldwide is for farm irrigation.
"In the dawn of the 21st Century, for the first time in history, mankinds unquenchable thirst, whetted by a voracious industrial demand, gargantuan engineering capacities, and sheer multiplication of human population and individual consumption levels, was starting to significantly outstrip many plantetary ecosystems absolute supply of readily accessible and renewable, clean, fresh, liquid water (from rainfall, and thousands of dams, and groundwater). Based on current useage trends, practices, and foreseeable technologies, it was doubtful there was enough freshwater returning to the Earth's surface in the natural water cycle of evaporation and precipitation to sustain economic growth. An explosion of competition for fresh water looms." We are experiencing the beginning of huge dustbowls.
WHAT CAN WE DO AS A COMPANY
SA emphasizes the conservation of water in growing crops and by doing so we see a good future for our systems.
In light of this, Saladacres is presented with an great opportunity for expansion to meet the present and future demand for our products. Retail prices for fresh produce are rising. This indicates a shortage for any number of reasons, a strong demand, or both. The trend is a good indicator to start production and expand quickly. Our customers will be the benefactors.
As a company we offer a sustainable method of crop growing for both greenhouse and field environments. We use 1/10 of the water compared to arid field agriculture, with zero pollution runoff, and do not require arable land. We generate our own power from renewable fuels and produce year round. We can treat saline water to an irrigation grade. Our crops are clean, pure, and healthy.
We are presented with a great opportunity for expansion to meet the present and future demand for our products. Retail prices for fresh produce are rising. This indicates a shortage for any number of reasons, a strong demand, or both. Price increases reflect the times. Our customers will be the benefactors.
As a reverse benefit, we can replace produce from areas that are drought stricken, and locate our facilities close to markets, thereby saving on transport costs.
References
(1) Fagan, Brian, The Great Warming, Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. Bloomsbury, NY
(2) Chris Wood, Dry Spring, The Coming Water Crisis in North America, Raincoat Books
(3) Stephen Chu, U.S. Secretary of Energy and California resident
(4) National Geographic, Sept. 2008