I’ve been thinking (and worrying) about water a lot lately. I suppose that the drought has brought all this concern along. Just a few months ago, folks were comparing this drought to the one that devastated Texas agriculture in the ’50s (when crop yields dropped by as much as 50%, all but one county in Texas was declared a federal drought disaster area, and grasslands were scorched and ranchers that couldn’t afford high hay prices resorted to a mixture of prickly pear cactus and molasses), but now folks are saying that this drought is well on its way to being worse, and certainly more costly, than any other dry spell in Texas history.
We’re already seeing ranching and agriculture suffer substantially from this drought. Agricultural officials are now pinning crop and livestock losses at $3.6 billion. Just 12% of the cotton acreage planted this year will be harvested, and many gins won’t open up this season because there isn’t enought work to justify it. Ranchers are also buying high priced hay and feed supplements because their own pastures haven’t produced enough to feed their herds. Ranchers are selling off calves younger and thinner than usual, and even letting go of the mature females that sustain their herds. In the last week, Bastrop County alone lost 12,000 cattle from the drought. As Roy Wheeler, an Atascosa County rancher told the San Antonio Express-News, “We’re selling the factory, so they say.”
So why worry about the weather, you may ask. Haven’t farmers and ranchers been scraping by and beaten by the weather since the first man stuck a seed in the ground? Perhaps, but during the dust bowl and in this last great drought in the ’50s, we could still shake our fists at the sky and vow never to go hungry again — but now we can only shake our fists at ourselves. There’s not a doubt in my mind that this drought is a result of human interference. I’m no scientist, just an educated girl with a blog, but I’d bet the farm that we’re seeing global warming in action.
But you don’t have take my word for it. Take the word of Dr. Gerald North, a climate scientist at that notorious liberal holdout Texas A&M, who says that this drought is the beginning of a permanent trend for Texas. He cites the 2007 IPCC report, which shows trends toward hotter and drier summers. In reference to this weather pattern, North told the Environment News Service that, “It could be just a fluke that persists for a decade… But my guess is that it’s here to stay, but with fluctuations up and down.”
Of course we can’t point at any one weather event and say that it is a direct result of global warming, but we can take events as indicative of what is to come as global warming progresses. Just as Hurricane Katrina woke up the world to the devastation that will ensue as storms of increase in frequency and severity from climate change, this current drought can give Texans a hint of what the future of Texas weather will look like.
There’s a terrible element of irony here. Our current trajectory of unsustainable growth and energy consumption increase the likelihood that drought in Texas will become the new norm. AND those same industries and energy sources which have poisoned our atmosphere and raised global temperatures… use enormous amounts of water. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear — which propents are trying to sell as “the low-carbon cure we need” — are incredibly, enormously, despicably water intensive. (more…)
