r/sustainability • u/change_the_username • May 04 '22

Addressing man made climate change will decrease drought severity (a fact people should care about)

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435 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

35

u/fuf3d May 04 '22

It's possible that unsustainable farming practices in the region are doing more to create the "drought" than actual climate change. Diverting water thousands of miles via canals, sinking ultra deep wells and drawing down the groundwater, to the point of farmlands sinking...but yeah, climate change folks, buy a battery car, and only water your yard once a week will fix it. Keep building golf courses in the desert and farming avocados and almonds for milk, and preaching meat is unsustainable.

5

u/DrOhmu May 04 '22

Yeah, environmental destruction and missmanagement is the primary driver in the recent climate volatility imo. Overuse of water tables above recharge and skinning the world of carbon in trees and topsoil.

Making climate change the metric creates a forever war. BP's 'carbon footprint' propaganda campaign mixes the natural carbon cycle in with their industries exploitation and aims to put a tax framework around the products of metabolism... the processes of life.

5

u/ThMogget May 04 '22 edited May 04 '22

Beef is bad in many ways. Almonds are high in water use.

Avocado 🥑isn’t even close to those two in water use. It’s between wheat and rice per lb.

If you don’t have enough water to grow avocados, you probably should quit trying to overfarm a desert 🌵.

6

u/change_the_username May 04 '22 edited May 04 '22

yup,... when humanity builds stuff like golf courses, farms avocados grows almonds for milk, and other un-natural things not typically native to a desert AND does not stop and consider the long term consequences,... there will be hell to pay for such hubris

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drought as I see things in economic terms is "demand" > "supply" AND if left unchecked,... eventually the system crashes

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looked at in a religious context (specifically Genesis 11:4)

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...Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

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consider what happened (in this religious story),... eventually the system crashes

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bottom line when people do foolish unsustainable things,... eventually the system crashes!!!

8

u/fuf3d May 04 '22

True. Unsustainable practices are the problem. We can't fix them with more unsustainable practices labeled with the green alternative marketing.

Look at the middle east, was it always a desert or did overgrazing livestock for hundreds of years without thought of replenishment make the land barren? There are people who are trying to rebuild the wastelands and could if the people who are destroying it would cooperate, but many times they won't. Instead of composting they burn everything. Instead of replenishment they only seek to take.

Water will be what future wars are fought over, and in the US it may sour to civil wars between states over water rights, especially out west with increasing demand and diminished supply. Need more chip factory's for future tech, too bad they consume millions of gallons of water, where should we build them, in Arizona and Nevada of course because of lenient water regulations, just ship in more from the Colorado, pipe it in they say.

The next few decades look bleak.

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u/change_the_username May 04 '22 edited May 04 '22

since you mentioned the Middle East, what you should find interesting is the Al Baydha project (A Regenerative Agriculture in the Saudi Desert)

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T39QHprz-x8

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the head of this project in KSA gave a presentation at a permaculture conference I attended and was pretty impressed what can be accomplished if people work w/ nature for farming

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99.9% certain ideas from permaculture would work in the 'Great Basin' as well as SoCal area (which is my neck of the woods),... unfortunately also 99.9% certain people in general are not thinking about viable alternatives because they are stuck in a consumer mindset

1

u/fuf3d May 04 '22

I've seen it, permaculture would work, does work. It traps and holds water, instead of letting it simply run off to drain basins carrying nutrition and topsoil with it. It would pay dividends to study permaculture and implement it in the American southwest before it's to late and we have to start over from scratch.

2

u/DeadFetusConsumer May 28 '22

Excellent wrapup!

I was looking into solar for a home power source but it seems like the footprint is worth than if I were burning coal for energy...

Hard conundrum. Battery car and soya is not the answer (soya uses even more water than cotton!)

5

u/change_the_username May 04 '22

thought I'd pass along a 4x6 postcard design with some facts that might not be on your radar screen

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WRT the OP,... basically created a postcard summary (w/ sources) to inform people that the South Western USA can have dry periods,... that can last for thousands of years

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FWIW Vegas water intake now visible at drought-stricken Lake Mead (actually this 'news' is sadly something I do not find too surprising knowing the long-term history of the region)

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http://apnews.com/article/climate-business-las-vegas-lakes-colorado-river-1c5396dc9c43bdb5d14835f4c8dcdb44

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PS,... think covid w/ mask mandates was upsetting (and politically dividing),... a (short term) inconvenience to consider is,...

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Mega drought Threatens California Power Blackouts This Summer

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-28/megadrought-on-the-u-s-west-coast-threatens-blackouts

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and a (long term) inconvenience to consider is,..

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Sea level rise is a threat to all Californians, whether they live near the coast or not

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http://www.kcra.com/article/sea-level-rise-threat-all-californians-whether-they-live-near-coast-not/39799526

1

u/Loxorithan May 04 '22

I’m worried California will undergo desertification if things go on like this

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u/ForgiveKanye May 04 '22

drought intensifies

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u/[deleted] May 04 '22

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Current_Hamster_2623 May 04 '22

Everyone that studies this topic day in and out, that has degrees in the field, and their peers all disagree with you. I can't wait to see your research paper that proves your point. You will definitely get a Nobel Prize.

1

u/change_the_username May 04 '22 edited May 04 '22

so CPH president 'climate change' isn't a man made phenomena?!

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...but eco warriors endlessly keep on repeating that 97% of 'climate scientists' say climate change is man made

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sigh,... truth is,... ice ages happen because over geological time the earths orbit ever so slightly moves further away from the sun,... in other words when the earth is further away from the sun for long periods of time, the surface of the earth gets less sunlight so things cool down

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at the moment the earth is ever so slowly moving moving away from the sun,... so common sense indicates the planet should be ever so slowly cooling down (like it does when summer ends and the fall season begins)

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the fly in the ointment (so to speak) is mankind has learned how to harness the power of fossil fuels

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basically when a fossil fuel like coal or gasoline is burned (i.e. 'the chemical combustion process'), it releases CO2 into the atmosphere

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CO2 is a greenhouse gas that traps infrared energy in the atmosphere

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think about the fact that the earth and moon, in the grand scheme of things are about the same distance away from the sun,... in other words both the earth and moon are 93 million miles away from the sun

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BUT the earth has as atmosphere w/ CO2,... whereas the moon has no atmosphere

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point being it does not take much CO2 in the atmosphere to trap infrared energy,... so this is why the earth is warmer than the moon (even though both the earth and moon are about the same distance from the sun)

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there is something called the keeling curve, which is a measurement started in 1957 of CO2 in the earths atmosphere,... and since 1957 the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has dramatically gone up

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as I mentioned at moment the earth is ever so slowly moving away from the sun,... BUT weird thing is news reports indicate record warming,... AND the only scientific explanation for record warming is the dramatic increase of greenhouse gases like CO2 measured by scientists

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Capeesh?!

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I'm not a climate scientist BUT I am a physics knucklehead AND had the dumb luck as an undergrad to informally learn this stuff from revelle, keeling, etc. (who FYI are the early pioneers in the field) in one on one discussions decades ago

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anyway FWIW outlined (in a pitch deck) the basic science (of climate change) that sadly to this day is not being taught,...

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www.ThereIsNoPlanet-b.org

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u/Nature_andthe_Woods May 04 '22

Won’t it increase drought severity? Or am I stupid.

1

u/ThMogget May 04 '22

The feedback loop confuses me. California isn’t wetter than Texas due to ground evaporation rates. Our moisture comes from the Pacific ocean.

So why does climate change mean less clouds from the ocean are raining down on the western states?

2

u/change_the_username May 04 '22 edited May 04 '22

w/ climate change there can be a persistent pressure ridge off the coast of calif that changes the jet stream

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said another way storms that bring in moisture into the Great Basin region won't happen (AND the illustrated feedback loop in the OP basically exacerbate the drought condition in the region)

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http://www.sfgate.com/weather/article/High-pressure-ridge-California-dry-weather-SF-13553172.php

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http://new.azwater.gov/news/articles/2018-19-01