{"id":5047,"date":"2015-01-30T08:19:02","date_gmt":"2015-01-30T13:19:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5047"},"modified":"2015-01-30T08:19:02","modified_gmt":"2015-01-30T13:19:02","slug":"lessons-from-a-california-drought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5047","title":{"rendered":"Lessons from a California drought"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lessons from a California drought<\/a><\/h3>\n

Rain finally arrived in California this past December with a series of storms dumping deluges across the state. So much rain fell that localised flooding and landslides were a concern. Whether this means that the three-year drought, which stands to be the driest \u201cin over a millennium<\/a>\u201d\u00a0is breaking, however, is far from certain.<\/p>\n

The drought has devastated California\u2019s agriculture and driven LA residents to rip out their\u00a0lush green lawns<\/a>. There has been something apocalyptic in the air as farmers drained the state\u2019s aquifers last year, and vast reservoirs were sucked dry,sparking water wars<\/a>. As 2015 begins, 99% of the state is rated \u2018abnormally dry<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n

It has been much debated whether climate change has been at work across California \u2013 and the western United States more generally. At a global level, 2014 is now confirmed as the warmest year on record. Noted scientist\u00a0Peter Gleick<\/a>\u00a0argues that the rising temperatures in California along with atmospheric shifts (like\u00a0the band of high pressure<\/a>\u00a0that sat along the Pacific coast in 2013 keeping storms at bay) are the \u201cfingerprints\u201d of human-induced climate change and they\u2019ve been making the drought worse. But the western United States is also naturally arid \u2013 early explorers labelled the region the \u2018Great American Desert\u2019\u00a0on their maps<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Critical drought has been impacting agriculture around the world. BBC Radio 4\u2019s Shared Planet programme recently reported on the impact of drought in East Africa\u00a0 and the plight of pastoralists in the region,\u00a0while the drought in Brazil<\/a>, which is hitting its three most populous regions, is being characterised as \u201cthe worst\u2026 since 1930\u201d. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly warned that drought will increasingly impact food security across the world, and water management must be given greater consideration. This is one area where the water issues of California and the western United States might offer a significant lesson on living in drought.<\/p>\n

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

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lessons from a California drought Rain finally arrived in California this past December with a series of storms dumping deluges across the state. So much rain fell that localised flooding and landslides were a concern. Whether this means that the three-year drought, which stands to be the driest \u201cin over a millennium\u201d\u00a0is breaking, however, is […]<\/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":[20,101,141,220,288,866],"class_list":["post-5047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-agriculture","tag-california","tag-climate-change","tag-drought","tag-extreme-weather","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5047","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=5047"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5048,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5047\/revisions\/5048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}