Climate change is a somewhat better moniker than global warming for what is happening all around us. This report of severe drought in the upper Plains States and the South made the front pages of the NY Times — at last. These are major social and economic events we know too little about, the major news chanels too concerned with John Mark Karr to spare bandwidth for what is affecting us all.
With parts of South Dakota at its epicenter, a severe drought has slowly sizzled a large swath of the Plains States, leaving farmers and ranchers with conditions that they compare to those of the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s.
Drought experts say parts of the states most severely affected — Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming — have been left in far worse shape because of recent history: several years of dry conditions, a winter with little snow and then, with moisture reserves in the soil long gone, a wave of record heat this summer.
Drought on the Great Plains
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Sunday’s SF Chronicle had a front and center, above-the-fold with a color photo, article by Carl Hall, the science writer, on deteriorating conditions in the Sierra Nevada. For you Bay Area folks and back country hikers this is a keeper.
State water managers are beginning to face the possibility that 40 to 90 percent of the Sierra’s water storage may be lost this century if warming continues as projected. Already, studies document up to 78 percent reduction in the size of Sierra glaciers.
Global warming appears to be reducing summer stream flows, drying out meadows, altering the distribution of pine trees, spreading insect infestations, worsening the risk of cataclysmic fires, and pushing rare amphibians and birds toward extinction.