Drought

1The Intelligent Citizen’s Guide to His World: Drought

Drought is the stingy twin of wasteful flood. The two often go hand in hand, as they did in China in

2010-2011. First came drought. As Keith Bradsher reported (New York Times, February 8, 2011), the

Chinese government warned farmers in China’s “food bowl,” Shandong province, to expect the worst

drought in at least the last two centuries. The FAO found that 5.16 million hectares (12.75 million

acres) – 91% of China’s wheat fields – were withering in the fields. More than a quarter of a million

livestock were short of water and about the same number of people were thirsting. In May, the Chinese

government declared more than 1,300 lakes “dead” according to Jonathan Watts in The Guardian (May 25, 2011).

What was happening in China was multiplied by events in two of the major producers of food

grains. The scorching summer of 2010 in Russia and the more recent floods in Australia have combined

to send food prices skyrocketing. (see essay #8 Food Grains and Moving Up the Food Chain) And,

since worldwide at least a billion people were already on the edge of hunger, these climate-caused crop

failures threatened starvation.

Starvation was not a danger in China because the

country has trillions of dollars in its cash reserves and

could afford to buy what it needed on the world market.

But the Chinese, like a number of other governments,

decided that, since they might not always be able to

buy produce, they should acquire land and water rights

abroad. Thus was born a new form of colonialism. (see

essay #15 Land and the New Colonialism)

Drought had already struck the United States. In

the fall of 2009, the U.S. Department of Agriculture

issued a “Drought Monitor” map (right). A similar

map, produced a year and a half later, in March 2011,

showed that the drought had spread across virtually the

whole southern part of the United States.

DroughtChapter 6

http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu


“By July 2011, Texas and New Mexico

had completed the driest six-month period

on record.” The U.S. Drought Monitor in

June rated 94% of Texas pasture “poor or

very poor.” And farmers lost 30% of their

crops. (NASA “Texas Drought Disaster” July

27, 2011)

At that time, as Kim Severson and Kirk

Johnson reported in the New York Times, corn was withering in the fields or too weak

to pollinate, cotton was too weak to grow,

and ranchers feared they would have to sell

off their herds since they could not feed or

water them. The Department of Agriculture

designated all 254 counties in Texas “natural

disaster areas.” Losses in Texas alone were estimated at more than $3 billion. Some expected a social

disaster comparable to the 1930s “Dust Bowl.”

In South America, Earth-week reported in October 2010

that Bolivia’s severe drought

“’kindled these massive, wide-

spread blazes according to the

Bolivian Forest and Lands

Authority.” In this NASA satel-

lite image, huge plumes of

smoke can be seen streaming

from countless wildfires.e

Courtesy of NASA

Courtesy of NASA


Meanwhile further south in Argentina and

Uruguay, similar conditions were already evident in

this NASA satellite image of February 2009.

The impact on the rain forest of the drought of

2011 was particularly severe. A NASA-sponsored

study based on a decade worth of satellite images

warmed that warming climate could also “cause

carbon stored in rotting wood to be released into the

atmosphere.” (See essay #29 The Carbon Issue)

“Very high leaf area” forest is shown in red; savanna in green and desert in yellow. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov

http://peakoil.com/forums/post871045.html


“The greenness levels of Amazonian vegetation – a measure of its health – decreased dramati-

cally over an area more than three and one-half times the size of Texas and did not recover to normal

levels, even after the drought ended in late October 2010,” wrote the leader of the study group. This

is evident in the following NASA image from 2010.

Very similar conditions affected southern Africa as is evident in this 2007 NASA image. Drought

and extreme heat caused a 40% drop in crop yields, according to the US Department of Agriculture’s

Foreign Agricultural Service. Three years later, in 2010, PBS reported it to be the worst drought in

over half a century.

http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/50000/50136/amazonndvia_tmo_2010_front.png

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=7590


And across central Africa drought stretched like a brown band, as is evident in this NASA map and

image of July 23, 2011.

On July 20, the UN declared a famine in parts of southern Somalia -- a famine is defined as a situ-

ation when “at least 20 per cent of households in an area face extreme food shortages with a limited

ability to cope; acute malnutrition rates exceed 30 per cent; and the death rate exceeds two persons

per day per 10,000 persons.” Other regions of Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti are in either a

“food crisis” or a “food emergency.”

The cause of the drought is a weather “event” far away in the Pacific, La Niña (see essay #18 on El

Niño and La Niña) which cools the western region and thus diminishes evaporation of the sea and so

reduces rainfall throughout the area.

The Horn of Africa is experiencing the worst drought in 60 years. According to the United

Nations World Food Program (AP, July 22, 2011), tens of thousands of people have already starved to

death and about 10 million people risk starvation. Failure of crops resulting in shortages of food have

caused staple foods like maize (corn) nearly to triple in price in recent months; this effectively denies

food to the poor who form the vast majority of the population.


This is what it looks like on the ground. First to go are the animals.

Courtesy of The Guardian, July 23, 2011

Courtesy AlJazeera, July 20, 2011


Then the people.

Summing up the information

on these severe weather events, the

American National Science Founda-

tion on October 19, 2010 published

the results of a study by the National

Center for Atmospheric Research

that predicted that the “United

States and many other heavily popu-

lated countries face a growing threat

of severe and prolonged drought in

coming decades.” This poor cow

must feel that it is already here.

“Inside Dadaab refugee settlement” (courtesy The Observer July 24, 2011

Near Manor, Texas. Boston Globe, September 11, 2011.


Significant drying could affect much of Latin America and southwest Asia, most of Africa and

Australia, southeast Asia and China and the Mediterranean. Within the next 25 or so years, drylands

will have greatly expanded as shown in the maps (below) generated by the National Science Founda-

tion sponsored study:

The first map (top) is a computer-generated projection to the decade of the 2030s; the middle map is a projection of the decade of the 2060s and the third, bottom, map is a projection to the 2090s. The mid century conditions will have deteriorated and those by the end of the century could be catastrophic. The color shading gives a key to conditions. The deeper red is the drier area. It spreads out over the world as the years go by. The three maps project the trend for this century.


As the NASA specialists reported, “More of the United States was in exceptional drought in July

2011 than in any other month in the past 12 years, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

The worst of the drought is spread across Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and parts of Arizona, Colo-

rado, Nebraska, and Louisiana. But 26 percent of the lower 48 states experienced severe to extreme

drought in July.”

“On the other hand, about 33 percent of the contiguous United States experienced exceptionally rainy

weather in July. The wet weather occurred largely in the Northern Plains and Western states…“ These weather

patterns—the mix of unusually dry and unusually wet—are reflected in plant growth. The image (above) shows

plant growth in July compared to average conditions. Places where plants were growing more than average are

green, while unusually poor growth is shown in brown.

NASA satellite image/map July 2011

Drought

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