{"id":11191,"date":"2015-08-18T08:12:18","date_gmt":"2015-08-18T13:12:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11191"},"modified":"2015-08-18T08:12:18","modified_gmt":"2015-08-18T13:12:18","slug":"tomgram-william-debuys-entering-the-mega-drought-era-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11191","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: William deBuys, Entering the Mega-Drought Era in America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: William deBuys, Entering the Mega-Drought Era in America<\/a><\/span><\/h3>\n

The other day here in New England it was chilly, rainy, and stormy and I complained. Where was the sun? The warmth? The summer? I happened to be with someone I know from California and he shook his head and said, \u201cIt\u2019s fine with me. I like it rainy. I haven\u2019t seen much rain in a while.\u201d It was a little reminder of how insular we can be. California, after all, is in the fourth year of a fearsome drought that has turned much of the North American West, from\u00a0Alaska<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Canada<\/a>\u00a0to the Mexican border, into a tinderbox. Reservoirs are\u00a0low<\/a>, rivers quite literally\u00a0drying up<\/a>, and the West is burning. In rural northern California, where the fires seem to be least under control, the Rocky Fire has already burned\u00a0109 square miles<\/a>\u00a0and destroyed\u00a043 homes<\/a>, while the Jerusalem Fire, which recently broke out nearby, quickly ate upalmost 19 square miles<\/a>\u00a0while doubling in size and sent local residents fleeing, some for the second time in recent weeks.<\/p>\n

Fires have doubled in these drought years in California. The fire season, once mainly an autumnal affair, now seems to be just about\u00a0any day<\/a>\u00a0of the year. (This isn\u2019t, by the way, just a California phenomenon. The\u00a0latest study<\/a>\u00a0indicates that fire season is extending globally, with a growth spurt of 18.7% in the last few decades.) In fact, fire stats for the U.S. generally and the West in particular are\u00a0worsening<\/a>\u00a0in the twenty-first century, and this year looks to be quite a blazing affair, with six million acres already burned across the region and part of the summer still to go.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

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Tomgram: William deBuys, Entering the Mega-Drought Era in America The other day here in New England it was chilly, rainy, and stormy and I complained. Where was the sun? The warmth? The summer? I happened to be with someone I know from California and he shook his head and said, \u201cIt\u2019s fine with me. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[101,141,220,369,7413,6462,866,8242],"class_list":["post-11191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-california","tag-climate-change","tag-drought","tag-global-warming","tag-tomdispatch","tag-tomgram","tag-water","tag-william-debuys"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11192,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11191\/revisions\/11192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}