by Patrick Appel
Plumer provides five maps that illustrate the severity of the drought:
This isn’t a one-year event: at least half of the United States has faced drought on and off since 2012 — at the peak in July 2013, some 81 percent of the country was experiencing at least some level of drought. …Put together, the 2012-14 drought has been one of North America’s biggest since the costly 1988-89 drought.
In response, Philip Bump argues that “the current level of national drought isn’t remarkable” given that “half the country has been in drought for half of the weeks since January 2000.” What is unusual:
The actual problem right now is noted by Plumer, a little further down. “[E]very single part of California is now facing ‘severe,’ ‘extreme,’ or ‘exceptional’ drought,” he writes, “the first time that’s happened in the [Drought Monitor]’s 15-year history.” The drought is substantially worse than past droughts. That’s the problem. And that is exactly what we’d expect to see in a warming world.
William Cowan urges Californians to remember that their state is just as prone to floods as it is to drought, writing that “may be no better moment than the dry present to remember the extraordinary washout of 1862, which brought what was likely the most expansive flooding in the recorded history of America’s West”:
Aridity is the norm here, but it is only part of the story. Despite its reputation for perpetual sunshine, Southern California may face as great a risk from cataclysmic flooding as any other major metropolitan region in the United States. Its geologic history tells us so. Massive floods might be the exception, and yet, these events have factored into California’s history for millennia. Whether it is cyclical, the product of a changing climate or some frightening combination of both, extremes of weather, flood, and drought appear to be occurring with more regularity. We fear how dry we are now, but we will be wet again. And we should be prepared for that, too.
On that note, John Upton warns that the next El Niño could hurt the global food supply:
A dinosaurian belch of warm water thousands of miles wide has appeared at the surface of the Pacific Ocean near the equator. The warming ocean conditions have spurred NOAA to project a two-thirds chance that an El Niño will form by summer’s end. It’s tipped to be of the monster variety—the extreme type that could become more common with global warming. Because the planet has warmed since the last extreme El Niño, some 17 years ago, there are fears that these warm waters could herald record-shattering extreme weather and temperatures.
For a sense of the type of havoc that extreme El Niños can wreak, think back to the late 1990s, or to the early 1980s, when widespread flooding and droughts plagued every inhabited continent, bleaching corals, ravaging wildlife, and killing tens of thousands of people. And as you mull over those disturbing memories of yore, chew on a sandwich—and savor it, for the weather that’s forecast to strike us could make that bread harder to get.
The Dish 