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Australia experienced the worst and most consistent dry period in its recorded history over much of the past decade. The Murray River failed to reach the sea for the first time ever in 2002. Fires swept much of the country, and dust storms blanketed major cities for days. Australia’s sheep population dropped by 50 percent, and rice and cotton production collapsed in some years. Tens of thousands of farm families gave up their livelihoods. The drought ended in 2010 with torrential rains and flooding.
Australia’s Millennium Drought is a wake-up call for residents of the drought-plagued southwestern U.S. and for all of us. What happened in Australia could happen in the U.S., with devastating consequences to the region and to the nation. We can avert the worst, however, if we pay attention to Australia’s experience and learn the right lessons.
The southwestern U.S. bears some resemblance to parts of Australia before the drought. Both include arid regions where thirsty cities and irrigated agriculture are straining water supplies and damaging ecosystems. The Colorado River no longer flows to the sea in most years. Water levels in major reservoirs have steadily declined over the past decade; some analysts project that the largest may never refill. The U.S. and Australia also share a changing global climate that is increasing the risk of drought.
Evidence is mounting that climate change is playing a role in Australia’s water woes. Since 1950 average rainfall has decreased 15 percent, and researchers found average temperatures over southeastern Australia from 1995 to 2006 were 0.3 to 0.6 degree Celsius higher than the long-term average. The combination of higher evaporation and lower precipitation depletes soil moisture and reduces runoff, making droughts more intense and more frequent. Australian scientists forecast a 35 to 50 percent decline in water availability in the Murray-Darling river basin and a drop in flows near the mouth of the Murray by up to 70 percent by 2030.
The Millennium Drought did have one benefit: it got people’s attention. Australians responded to these extremes with a wide range of technical, economic, regulatory and educational policies. Urban water managers in Australia have been forced to put in place aggressive strategies to curb water use and to expand sources of new and unconventional supplies. They have subsidized efficient appliances and fixtures such as dual-flush toilets, launched public educational campaigns to save water, and more. Between 2002 and 2008 per capita urban water use—already low compared with the western U.S.—declined by 37 percent.
Other efforts focus on tapping unconventional supplies, such as systems that reuse gray water, cisterns to harvest rooftop runoff, and sewage treatment and reuse. The country’s five largest cities are spending $13.2 billion to double the capacity of desalination, enough to meet 30 percent of current urban water needs.
Even in the midst of the drought, Australia moved forward with plans to restore water to severely degraded aquatic ecosystems. The government has continued with plans to restore rivers and wetlands by cutting withdrawals from the Murray-Darling river basin by 22 to 29 percent. It has committed $3 billion to purchase water from irrigators to restore ecosystems. Regulators introduced water markets in the hope of making farms more water-efficient and reducing waste. Despite efforts to phase out subsidies, the government announced more than $6 billion in aid to improve irrigation infrastructure and make it more productive.
The southwestern U.S. states would do well to push for these kinds of reforms before a similar disaster strikes. They need to tackle difficult policy issues, such as development of water markets and pricing, expansion of water efficiency and productivity programs, elimination of government subsidies that encourage inefficient or unproductive water use by cities and farms, and agricultural reform. As the climate continues to change, smart water planning may help ease the impacts of unexpected and severe shocks that now appear inevitable.
This article was originally published as "The Coming Mega Drought."
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45 Comments
Add CommentWhile I personally found the article by Gleick and Heberger convincing, those of us who follow U.S. politics will immediately recognize that nothing will happen until a crisis is undeniable, and probably not even then. Two lines of argument that will then appear are already clear. One will find its anchor in the statement “The southwestern U.S. bears some resemblance to parts of Australia before the drought.” But, it will be noted, there are also differences. The second reply will continue the non-ending chant that the market will solve the problem if it is only left to run freely. Sadly, what is missing from this article, and the many similar articles and books, is a specific set of proposals that can be followed now to move the political establishment. Writing that affected parties should push for reforms and tackle difficult policy issues will predictably have no effect. Perhaps nothing will, but it would be nice to see the kind of intelligence exhibited in the article being directed to describing specific actions that specific individuals can take now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHarold Brown
The authors leave us hanging by not explaining what they mean at the end of this article by the term, "agricultural reform."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMike Wade
California Farm Water Coalition
As a native of the American Southwest and as one familiar with water issues--and the writings of these and other science-based authors--I am disappointed that this article only refers to the supply side of the water issue, or how to find more water or stretch available supplies further. There is no mention of the demand side--applicable to rapidly growing Australia too--or how to decrease pressures, especially population-driven pressures on water. The U.S. is the world's 3rd most populated nation, behind only China and India, and grows (despite Census Bureau efforts to depict otherwise) at a whopping 1.1 percent a year, or population doubling times of about 60 years. The Southwest is the fastest growing region of this rapidly growing nation, yet no one--except scientists (including the National Academy of Sciences, the Pacific Institute and the Scripps Institute)--will talk about that high growth rate; whether political and economic leaders have a moral or any other right to continue to try to not only continue, but to increase, that high growth rate; whether national policies (including immigration at five-times historical norms, higher even than during the frontier-era Great Wave) that fuel it should continue; and when or if the DEMOGRAPHIC implications of immigration policy are to be considered by Congress and others responsible for its high levels. Its clear that we as a nation--just as we have embraced irresponsible economic policies that have gotten us into a crisis--embrace a "damn the consequences" population growth policy and seem unwilling to consider the consequences, including that a prolonged drought (evidence of which has been nearly biblical in this region in recent years) could fuel a crisis, economic and otherwise, of perhaps civilization-ending proportions in a region almost solely dependent on the waters of one relatively small river.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoes not the fact that the Colorado River often no longer reaches the Gulf of California after the prodigious useless waste of Las Vegas (in spite of some recycling) violate still another treaty with Mexico?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThank goodness that the authors didn't try to go to the dark side by exclaming that climate change is man-made. What could have been done is describe the fact that this world has gone through cold and warm periods:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEGYPTIAN COOLIING - 750 - 450 BCE
ROMAN WARMING - 200 BCE - 600 CE
DARK AGES COOLING - 440 CE - 900 CE
MEDIEVAL WARMING - 900 CE - 1300 CE
LITTLE ICE AGE COOLING - 1300 CE - 1900 CE
MODERN WARMING - 1900 CE - PRESENT
The earth warms and cools depending on the sun. Mile-long ice cores confirm these facts. Droughts and rainy seasons come and go. Nothing that man can do can change what the sun's cycles will challenge us with. Even stopping the Mexicans from coming over the borders isn't going to change whether we have a drought or not.
Idiot predictors of terrible global weather extremes are getting tiresome and downright boring. It's the sun, stupid!
I was a trucker for a few years, and I regularly hauled about 45,000 lbs of botted water out of the desert of southern California near Palm Springs. Sometimes I would take it to the Denver area. I would climb the Rockies and watch the Colorado River flowing back down behind me as I was hauling water that possibly originated in the Colorado River ( some desert aquafers are recharged with imported Colorado river water). Other times I'd hall it to the Sacramento,CA area where much SoCal water originates. All I can think is, who the heck is in charge of this crazy system? Don't they have bottles in Denver that can be filled with water?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI recall reading about the Murray river running dry
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisearly in the 20'th century. A quick google search
produced this link.
http://home.iprimus.com.au/foo7/droughthistory.html
There are a lot of other links as well. Another quick search appears to indicate that at present
the various storage areas for the Durray-Darling basin are filled to about 85-90% of capacity.
I think these authors are stretching the facts a bit.
Blue green algae radically changed the atmoshpere; why can't man?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey'll get their water back when they peel the cold dead hands from the last driver from the last golfer West of the Mississippi; until then, get used to real "sand"wiches.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe algae transformed the atmosphere (and oceans) over a period of 1.5 billion years...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery well put - thanks!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFYI - the global population will soon have tripled since I was born in 1950. While it's 'only' expected to increase from 7 billion to 9 billion by 2050, consider that the population reached 1 billion for the first time in human history in the early 1800s - at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Since then, mechanization of farming and increasing reliance on irrigation and fertilizers produced from petroleum have dramatically increased agricultural production. However, significant amounts of irrigation in the U.S. utilize non-replenished fossil water aquifers.
While we look at the droughts of the 1930s during the 'Dust bowl' of Midwest North America (along with non-sustainable farming methods) as catastrophic, that was a 'drop in the bucket' compared to historical droughts.
As amalcr points out there have been devastating periods of climate change in human history. Many such periods of produced effects such as the fall of civilizations such as the Egyptian Old Kingdom and periods of 'dark ages'. Large percentages of populations died miserable deaths due to starvation and disease. During some periods cases of widespread cannibalism occurring among previously civilized societies have been documented.
At no time has any population of billions of people ever survived any period of major climate change.
We simply do not have the power to change the drought. We could reduce impact on borderline ecosystems like desert edges, and clear cutting forests, or vast albedo changing agriculture. But, that is unlikely. And, the dust bowl returns for a while no matter what we do to squeak by. Um, most likely, this interglacial will end for a new ice age. Southwest may be better then, but equatorial crowding is more likely.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1st I heard that climate science can predict how particular areas of the planet will be affected by so-called global warming. If they are so sure as to why Australia and parts of the US have/will experience drought, then could they care to explain why the UK winter in 2011 is no warmer than what it was in 1910?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/actualmonthly/
(Then choose "mean temperature" from middle column and "Winter" from right hand column.
Whenever I've presented this clear hole in global warming theory, I've been told that climate science can't predict how particular areas in particular seasons will react to global warming, however long the period of time the data covers. Essentially climate is breaking the known science around convection and radiation.
According to the UN, the US population growth rate is 0.97%, not 1.1%. This is below the global average of 1.17% & rates us a measly 131st of the 230 countries surveyed. And your comment that "The U.S. is the world's 3rd most populated nation, behind only China and India", while factually correct, lacks perspective. The US has barely a quarter the population of #2 India. By comparison, you have to go down the list all the way to # 16 Egypt before you find a country that has only 25% of the US's population.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut, based on your comments about "the DEMOGRAPHIC implications of immigration policy", I suspect you're just using water issues as a thinly-veiled justification for xenophobia.
Even without the anthropogenic accuastions, the article still smells like fear-mongering to me. I was leery from the beginning, but the note about the original title ("The Coming Mega drought") clinched it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"At no time has any population of billions of people ever survived any period of major climate change."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAt no time has any population of billions of people ever FACED any period of major climate change.
I suspect billions of insects have survived previous dramatic climate changes. If NASA can put a man on the moon (and waste time spreading global warming myths whilst the new rockets are being built), I'm sure that they can work out how we will survive. We've managed to survive from the end of the last ice age up to now, so millions of us have already coped with a more dramatic warming phase than any that the warmists claim we're heading for.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBecause the australian desert and the u.s. southwest
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishave the fact in common that they are both hot and dry
it is pretty self evident that at some time they will both have periods of severe drought. Other than that
I don't see a correlation. This is pretty self evident
and I hope the government didn't pay for this study.
If you are a climatologist and want grant money study
global warming.......what? Field to crowded?
Sheeeesss haven't you guys ever heard of the farmers
almanac.
I agree that water is going to become more and more
of an issue as the population pressure increases in
the southwest. My solution is just don't ship any water
there.....simple...no water ...no more people.
We have a lot of water in the great lakes and we intend to keep it.So if you get thirsty or have to play golf . Come to the water...or better yet move to canada. You aren't going to drain the great lakes so some developer in the southwest can get rich.
What denialists don't understand is the science behind the ENSO effect. They need to read this:-
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.enotes.com/el-nino-la-nina-phenomena-reference/el-nino-la-nina-phenomena
I think it's crystal clear. El Nino warms America and cools the western Pacific and La Nina does the opposite effect. You might ask why either situation would affect global mean temperature, because that's the dumbass kind of question denialists always do. 97% of peer reviewed scientists agree that global warming is very likely caused by mankind. That's all the science I need.
I'm sure that billions of insects have survived climate catastrophes in the past, but insects aren't people. JTDwyer's comment & my response were about people, who have numbered in the billions (plural) only since about 1930.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell said! I have been telling people, especially climate change deniers, that it doesn't matter who or what is causing the change because we are way past the time that humans could effect any real directional change in what is in fact taking place. What we should be doing now is planning for the inevitable consequences of climate change. We must 1) plan to deal with the environmental refugees who will have to move from drought ridden areas and flooded coast areas and 2) start immediate discussions on a worldwide birth control plan. This nonsense that human life is somehow more important that the viability of our worldwide ecosystem is utterly ridiculous! What good will it be to have 15-billion people on a planet depleted of all its resources and polluted to the point where it is unlivable??
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Come to the water...or better yet move to canada."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis remindas me of the late shock-comic Sam Kinnison's solution for famine in Africa - "Move to where the food is!"
Part of the problem is that the people arguing for the worldwide repercussions of El Nino/La Nina are the same ones trying to deny any similar global effects from the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age. Without rock-solid evidence to back up such arguments, it looks suspiciously like cherry-picking the data that agrees with your theory & ignoring whatever doesn't.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAdd to that the apples-&-oranges approach used to construct global temperature history - direct measurements for modern times (circa 1850 to present), but unverifiable proxy estimates for earlier times - and it becomes easy to understand why skepticism persists.
How many years did it take to form the fuels that we have transformed since the Industrial Revolution. If it takes 1,000,000 years to create an oil field, and we burn it up in 100 years, haven't we accelerated the process.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSorry if I wasn't clear - the changes being made to the environment by human industry is dramatically more sudden the oxidation of the Earth. Complex lifeforms are far less likely to successfully adapt to such sudden change.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf technological agricultural production or food and water distribution infrastructure suffers widespread failure for any reason the carrying capacity of the Earth's natural resources may be significantly less than 1 billion people.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEntirely possible. But because billion-plus human populations are a recent development, we don't have a historical/archaeological example on which to estimate HOW MUCH an environmental catastrophe will impact our population. The closest thing we've got is the "Toba catastrophe theory", which proposes that a mega-eruption on Sumatra c.70-75kya caused environmental changes that led to the human population falling to 5000-15000 individuals. However, this is far from proven & pre-Toba population figures are hard to come by and vary greatly. (I've seen figures from c.25K to c.100K.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo be clearer, if any environmental change (nuclear winter, whatever) reduces the population carrying capacity of the Earth back down to historical levels of, say 1 billion people, more than 6 billion people would die.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Too big to fail" did not originate with the banks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is human nature to deny the existence, and then the causes, of problems so huge as to disrupt life as we know it.
Such is the case with water, climate change, and many other cataclysmic disasters that are happening so slowly that the deniers can still ignore them and hold to their personal prejudices whatever they might be.
People will not acknowledge the disaster until it is too late to resolve it without incurring disaster Biblical in magnitude.
Part of the confusion is that there is a root cause, a force that drives many intermediate causes to which the disaster being considered is attributed.
When major aquifers approach total exhaustion there will be no way to avoid acceptance. In 1973 people went out in the streets and killed people because they were fearful they might not be able to fill their gas tanks. Of course that was extremely rare, but what do you think when the commodity is water and the risk is life.
Add to the water crisis the fact that about 10% of the coral reefs are dieing, ocean fish stocks are being seriously depleted, arable land is being destroyed by over use, diseases are arising in humans from various vectors.
Coral reefs are the principal breeding and brooding areas for much of the ocean life that feeds us. There are too many scientific articles on fish stocks, and too many issues to note, to list here. Anyone interested can find them very quickly. Cod fish off the Outer Banks of Canada reveal one major problem where the number of people who relied on cod fishing was growing rapidly while the cod fish stocks were being depleted.
There are many studies to tell us how we can feed the billions of people, but they are single minded. They do not tell us the problems of disease arising from intensive cultivation practices.
The tragic state of affairs you will find today arose when the population of the planet was smaller than it is today. We see the results of stress over the past 50+ years, stress that has grown in intensity as the global populations have ballooned.
Think seriously what you expect to see 10 years from now so that you will remember this and realize it is happening.
We have created this crisis because we have been playing God. God's original plans for planet Earth relied on checks and balances. The checks are painful for Man, and we have striven to eliminate diseases with great success.
Correcting a brilliant bit of dis-ingenuity:
We are keeping the poor poor by inducing them to keep the labor pools flooded.
As a born and bred Australian, I can tell you that our current weather patterns are nothing unusual. We are a land of "droughts and flooding rains" (from a poem written in 1902). We have experienced droughts lasting up to 30 years. We face recurring episodes of torrential rain, flooding and cyclones,because of our position on the globe.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd, just like the writers of this article, we have enviro-nazis and green activist radicals who are doomsayers, who preach end-of-the-world stuff, that what is happening today is unprecedented.
It is all lies and spin.
It is vitally important that everyone does a bit of basic research to discover the real facts.
Can a climate scientist provide a link to a model which has successfully predicted the flattening of the warming trend over the past decade, and that 2011 would be the 12th warmest year on record, the 11th being 1997 (some 14 years previous)?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisClimate scientists have produced a range of models and predictions over the years. I'm unaware of any that have successfully predicted the future. Without being able to produce such a model, they don't have a theory, which is why you'll note that personal abuse and cyber bullying is prevalant in the climate scientist community.
Spot on Jamie. There are photos of stretches of the Murray River taken during the Federation Drought around 1901 that were totally dry river beds. During the recent drought these areas continued to hold water.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are many exaggerations in the article about the Australian drought & the green inspired actions that caused billions to be spent on desalination plants rather than expanding dam capacities, at a fraction of the cost initially plus negligible energy costs to operate dam as opposed to desalination using fossil fuelled power. The same mad hatters prevent us from using nuclear power. The AGW mob convinced governments that we would not see a return to wetter seasons. Of course we have as most people over fifty predicted. The responses were appalling & we will be paying for them for generations.
‘In 1973 people went out in the streets and killed people because they were fearful they might not be able to fill their gas tanks.’
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReally? I do not remember that. Give us the details.
Alarmists alarmism alarmism. There is no doubt that mankind must learn to manage resources better & that there is a limit to the earth’s carrying capacity however the situation is not irretrievable. Many of the claims are outright lies. One example is claims about the greatest coral reef system in the world. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Many times scientists have raised the alarm about the danger of the reef suffering irretrievable man made environmental damage. In fact it is in great condition. It recovers from the effects of heat, drought & inundation by fresh water from great rivers in flood, as it has for millennia.
These repeated false claims by environmental scientists in the end are counter productive & have lead to great cynicism by the public to the point that nothing these people say is believed by many people. Even things that are of genuine concern will suffer as a result.
Their answer to everything is socialism with the attendant bureaucracy, regulation by these bureaucrats with little input from the people directly concerned & of course, taxes & charges.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe situation in California is as follows:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith a population of over 37 million (versus Australia's 22.5 million), 20% of the total water consumption is by residents at their homes.
80% of California's water usage is by agriculture and industry, principally agriculture.
The rice growing industry in California consumes an amount of water equal to the amount that all of the residents of California use, 20% of the total.
The government in Sacramento can do very little to get the water used by rice growers to be shifted to more practical uses, because century old policies by the federal government in Washington insure that rice growers will get their water, at below cost, even as neighboring farmers attempting to grow more practical crops, such as fruit trees, are forced to let their trees die for lack of water.
Implementing double flush toilets in the American Southwest will do absolutely nothing to solve our water shortage problems, as long as policies from Washington force taxpayers to subsidize the flooding of rice fields in the semi-arid regions of California.
http://www.aguanomics.com/2009/02/farm-subsidies.html
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.sfbg.com/2010/11/16/how-california-exports-water
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCertainly sounds like poor policy. Flood irrigation tends to raise salt levels too in arid regions. There are always problems changing established practices however. Here in Australia we have problems where urban spread pushes into rural areas & the new arrivals complain about the cocks crowing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt takes a lot more than 1 million years to make an oil field, but either way, your point stands. We have put back into the atmosphere in just 200 years an amount of CO2 that it took nature many, many millions of years to sequester under the ground, and we are only accelerating the process.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps nothing will, but it would be nice to see the kind of intelligence exhibited in the article being directed to describing specific actions that specific individuals can take now.<a href="http://www.bookofraonlinespielens.com/">book of ra</a>
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe are planning for the climate change and all of those environmental refugees. What do you think all of those fences and walls and detection systems on the Mexico border are for? With drone aircraft we can stop them over greater areas with fewer people. If it gets bad enough we can arm the drones.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI see no reason why many climate water problems can not be much ameliorated by intelligent management of water both before and after the water reaches the soil, including pumping it into water tables through large, clean gravel filled deep holes. Rhode Island pumps whole rivers into the ocean during a flood, so the pumps already exist. I suspect that such a technique could be used to flush salt or poisons out of ground water also if designed right.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOur management of water is very important. There is no reason why we should allow huge volumes of water to flop down and flow unimpeded across farms down stream, destroying them, while adjacent areas shrivel up by drought. There are huge pumps that can easily prevent this. Allowing river water to flow into the ocean from any country relying on ground water is not very intelligent either.
Increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is undoubtedly increasing climate warmth. However I suspect that also an equally great or greater affect on warmth is the baring of soil by increase in annual crop acreage, roads, buildings, grazing, and desertification currently, especially in the tropics and subtropics. This may be a considerable part of the reason why the southwestern USA tends to be warmer than the southeast. You may see an article that briefly discusses this in more detail in http://charles_w.tripod.com/climate.html . If you see any possible improvement or errors, please let me know.
I suspect that shrubs in the Arctic have the opposite affect.
Autralia drought had awful efection in autralian countries.now adays that southwestern u.s lot look like australia they have to save big amount of water .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thissoutwestern of u.s should do researchies on what spent in australia to prevent drought.in this case u.s save alot of money and of course eletric energy.
I'm positive that u.s can prevent drought by arboriculture and correct Irrigate.
Autralia drought had awful efection in autralian countries.now adays that southwestern u.s lot look like australia they have to save big amount of water .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thissoutwestern of u.s should do researchies on what spent in australia to prevent drought.in this case u.s save alot of money and of course eletric energy.
I'm positive that u.s can prevent drought by arboriculture and correct Irrigate.
Harold Brown is absolutely on target. I could not have put it better. Unfortunately we have gone from being the greatest innovators on the planet to a do-nothing country.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this