Places like California in the US have been suffering from droughts for years, with statewide water restrictions becoming the norm. However, record droughts in other parts of the world, such as Europe and Asia, are affecting everything from agriculture to energy transport. Many places now suffering from extreme heat and drought – such as the UK – do not necessarily have the infrastructure to deal with such extreme weather. And when the rain does fall, it is likely to cause flooding due to prolonged heat and dryness, as well as the massive amount of accumulated precipitation being released at once. This summer’s extended drought doesn’t bode particularly well for our collective climate future, and although some places like China are turning to creative approaches like cloud seeding to at least protect agriculture, heat waves are likely to become more severe in the future – contributing to further drought. This means more fires, more challenges to agriculture, especially in poor countries, and more displacement and hunger.
Droughts are everywhere and have a variety of causes
Droughts are not unprecedented events. They have occurred throughout history and have contributed to catastrophic consequences such as famine and displacement. In the US, the most severe drought on record is the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, in which low rainfall, extreme heat, and severe economic distress caused by the Great Depression, among other factors, combined to cause failure of crops, poverty and displacement in parts of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma. The droughts now plaguing parts of North America, the Horn of Africa, China, Britain and wider Europe do not necessarily have just one cause. In many cases, drought is a combination of extremely low rainfall and high temperatures. When temperatures rise, water evaporates faster, and when it does fall, it’s more likely to fall as rain instead of snow because of those same high temperatures, as Vox’s Neel Dhanesha explained. In California and the American West, snow—layers of snowfall kept frozen by subzero temperatures, which then melt as temperatures rise—is an important source of water. Less snow due to warmer temperatures, then, means water pumping is less reliable, and likely will continue to be for decades to come—contributing to the drought. As Vox’s Benji Jones wrote, agriculture in parts of California and Arizona is suffering due to drought on the Colorado River and low water levels in two reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Farmers are the main users of water from the Colorado River, and while some have already cut their supply, the drought isn’t likely to abate anytime soon — meaning future cuts will be necessary. That will be a problem for many Americans already reeling from high food prices due to inflation, Jones wrote: When farmers use less water, they tend to produce less food. And that could cause food prices to rise even more than they already have. Winter vegetables like lettuce and broccoli could take a big hit, as could Arizona’s delectable wheat. Even more troubling, the shrinking Colorado River is just one of many climate-related disasters that threaten the supply and affordability of food. In the Horn of Africa, low rainfall for four consecutive rainy seasons has caused the region’s worst drought in 40 years. In the region, which includes Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, occasional droughts were expected and something communities could prepare for. in 2022, the twice-yearly rainy seasons have failed to materialize again, pushing millions toward starvation. In 2020 and 2021, the spring rainy season called gu, which usually lasts from March to May, was short. In 2021 the deyr, which runs from October to December, also failed, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory. “These back-to-back hits are hard for farmers to take,” Ashutosh Limaye, a scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, said in January. “The challenge is not just soil moisture or rainfall anomalies. is the resilience of the population to drought’. China’s droughts in Hubei and Chongqing were combined with heavy rains elsewhere in the west, the Washington Post reported. In Chongqing, temperatures have reached 113 degrees Fahrenheit. in Xinwen County in Sichuan Province, temperatures reached 110°F last week. This extreme heat has dried up parts of the Yangtze River – a vital waterway and the longest river in China. The drought has caused widespread crop damage and limited access to drinking water in Hubei province, according to local emergency authorities, and electricity from the Three Gorges Dam – the world’s largest – has dropped about 40 percent since last year. reports Bloomberg. Although coal powers electricity in many provinces, heat and drought in China have caused power to shrink in Sichuan, with authorities forcing factories to shut down to save energy. The province is a critical hub for manufacturing solar panels and semiconductors, CNN reports, but residential and commercial air-conditioning use has surged as the heat has strained the power grid and drought has depleted hydropower. China is also turning to cloud seeding — charging clouds with silver iodide to form ice crystals, resulting in precipitation — to try to save crop yields, the Associated Press reported. While several countries, including the United States, have cloud seeding research programs, the technology has been around since the 1940s, Laura Kuhl writes for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. However, according to Kuhl, this is not a permanent solution. for starters, it does not address the underlying cause of climate change, nor does it promote other mitigation efforts. Additionally, there may be as-yet-unknown effects of cloud seeding, such as toxic buildup from the silver iodide commonly used to create condensation, and experts don’t fully know its effectiveness or how it will affect long-term hydrologic patterns. Europe, particularly Britain, is also suffering from record heat and drought. Temperatures in the UK reached 104°F last week and nearly 109°F in southwestern France, according to Axios. The fires have devastated parts of France, Spain and Portugal. Rivers in Italy and Germany are at such low levels that they are exposing battleships and bombs sunk during World War II, Reuters reports. Twin heat waves combined with record rainfall shortages have caused drought in some parts of England, the New York Times reported last week. It is Britain’s first official drought since 2018. While droughts are not unheard of in this part of the world, the combination of record temperatures and low rainfall also contributed to the July and August fires in London, which the London Fire Brigade it was poorly equipped due to staff and funding cuts. emergency services union officials told the Times. Europe, already feeling the pressure of energy cuts due to sanctions on Russian fuel exports, faces further challenges due to the drought, the New York Times reports. In Germany, coal-carrying ships cannot safely navigate the shallow rivers, and Norway’s hydropower output, which provides about 90 percent of the country’s energy supply, has not been this low for more than two decades. “We are not familiar with drought,” Sverre Eikeland, chief operating officer of Norwegian energy company Agder Energi, told the Times. “We need water.”
What do these droughts say about our climate future — and what can we do?
Although extreme heat, droughts, and floods have historical antecedents and intersecting causes, the weather patterns in the summer of 2022 have been exacerbated by human behavior, primarily industrialization and the use of fossil fuels, which causes climate change. According to the World Weather Attribution initiative, an international consortium of climate scientists who study the causes of extreme weather events, temperatures seen in the UK this July — up to 40.3 degrees Celsius, or almost 105 degrees Fahrenheit, were “ extremely unlikely.” would have occurred without anthropogenic climate change. “While Europe has been experiencing increasingly frequent heatwaves in recent years, the heat seen recently in the UK was so extreme that it is also a rare event in today’s climate,” the study found. That study, which combined observational and modeling analyses, found that human-induced climate change made extreme temperatures at least 10 times more likely. “The first truth is that we’re living in a nightmare,” NASA climatologist Kate Marvel told Axios about the extreme heat in Europe. “This is exactly what climate models would expect: intensification of extreme weather events, severe public health consequences, and incredibly disappointing congressional inaction. There is no reasonable scenario where warming stops at 1.2°C, so it will definitely get worse.” Governments and aid organizations are trying to deal with drought and subsequent famine, power cuts, wildfires, water shortages and other crises with strategies such as water and energy restriction and aid distribution, but time is running out. for aggressive action to mitigate climate change. In fact, trends appear to be going in the opposite direction, with Europe once again turning to coal power due to Russian fuel sanctions, as well as increased US greenhouse gas emissions last year, after years of stagnation or decline , according to a report from the Rhodium Group. There isn’t just a quick…
