The Mesopotamian Dust Bowl

Image of the day: Another Dust Storm Over Iraq and Kuwait

Thick clouds of dust blew from the agricultural lands between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers in Iraq on August 15, 2009. The pale dust obscures most of Kuwait and culminates in a distinct plume over the Persian (Arabian) Gulf. One plume on the east side of the storm is darker than the rest of the airborne dust. This plume either comes from a different type of source—exposed agricultural soil instead of desert, perhaps—or it is a plume of smoke from a fire. Red dots mark where the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) detected fires, but in this case, a fire may be hidden from the sensor by the dust storm. Ongoing drought may be contributing to the frequent and severe dust storms Iraq has experienced in 2009.

The MODIS sensor flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image on August 15, 2009. Twice-daily images of Iraq and Kuwait are available from the MODIS Rapid Response System.  NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Caption by Holli Riebeek.

Related Links:

• Iraq Faces Environmental Catastrophe
• Riyadh City May Collapse by 2010

• Iraq Ecocide Nears Totality
• Image of the Day: Sandstorm in Saudi Desert

• First Wave of World’s Collapsing Cities
• Future Scenarios
• Nuking Earth for Lifestyle

• World Problems: The Root Cause Matrix
• Giga Trends
• World CO2 Emissions

• Look me straight in the eye & tell me you can’t
• Protect Economy from Climate??!
• Blind scientists examining the economic elephant
• How Much Carbon Dioxide Does Your Money Make?
• Cosmic Scale Evil
• Index of Human Impact on Nature

• New York Cognitive Dissonance

• Carbon Footprint of Your Dollar
• The Billionaires’ contribution to CO2 pollution
• Stop Burning Earth
• Protect Economy from Climate??!
• Energy: 286W

• Failing Ecosystems

California: Biggest Desert in N America

CALIF DESERTIFICATION: NOT IF, BUT WHEN

Desertification of California in the Near Future Is Almost a Certainty

Drought often have significant environmental, economic and social impacts:

• Shortages of water for agricultural, industrial, municipal and personal uses.
• Death of livestock.
• Crop failure, reduced crop yields.
• Wildfires are more common during periods of drought.
• Dust storms created by drought-enhanced land erosion and by desertification.
• Malnutrition, dehydration and related diseases.
• Famine due to lack of water for irrigation.
• Social unrest.
• Mass migration, resulting in internal displacement and international refugees.
• War over natural resources, including water and food.
• Reduced electricity production due to insufficient available coolant for power stations and reduced water flow through hydroelectric dams.
• Snakes have been known to emerge and snakebites become more common.
• Creates windblown dust bowls which erodes the landscape, damages terrestrial and aquatic wildlife habitat. (Source)

US Drought Monitor

Objective Long Term Drought Indicator Blend Percentiles

Objective Short Term Drought Indicator Blend Percentiles
To view regional drought conditions, go to US Drought Monitor and click on the map. State maps can be accessed from regional maps.

Drought in California’s Central Valley

[Image acquired July 12 – 27, 2009 by EO – Posted Aug 16, 2009]

By the end of July 2009, California was well into its third dry year in a row. The image was made from data collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite between July 12 and July 27, 2009. The sensor records the amount of light that photosynthesizing plants absorb and reflect as they grow. The image shows how vegetation fared in 2009 compared to the average based on observations between 2000 and 2008. In places where plants were growing more than average, the image is green. Cream is used to denote average growth, and brown points to less plant growth than average. In this image, dark squares of brown are scattered across much of the Westlands and Tulare Lake water districts. These brown squares are fields that would ordinarily support irrigated crops, but in 2009 the crops were not growing well or the fields lay fallow.

References

• Drought Operations Center. (2009, July 31). California’s Drought Update. State of California Natural Resources Agency. Accessed August 14, 2009.
• Gorn, D. (2009, April 11). What’s killing California’s Salmon? National Public Radio. Accessed August 14, 2009.
• McChesney, J. (2009, May 11). Drought, politics trouble farmers in California. National Public Radio. Accessed August 14, 2009.
• Meehl, G.A., T.F. Stocker, W.D. Collins, P. Friedlingstein, A.T. Gaye, J.M. Gregory, A. Kitoh, R. Knutti, J.M. Murphy, A. Noda, S.C.B. Raper, I.G. Watterson, A.J.
• Weaver and Z.-C. Zhao. (2007). Global Climate Projections. In Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth
• Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S.,D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. Accessed August 14, 2009.
• Riebeek, H. (2007, May 11).Potential Effects of Global Warming. In Global Warming, NASA’s Earth Observatory. Accessed August 14, 2009.
• Sullivan, C. (2009, May 12). California water agency changes course on delta smelt. New York Times. Accessed August 14, 2009.
• Westlands Water District. Accessed August 14, 2009.
• Woolf, S. (2009, June 15). California water districts sue to force federal fish agencies to obey environmental laws. Westlands Water District. Accessed August 14, 2009.

NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data provided by Inbal Reshef, Global Agricultural Monitoring Project. Caption by Holli Riebeek and Rebecca Lindsey. [Edited by FEWW]

Related Links:

• Warning: California Is Being Mojavefied!
• Can’t have your water and eat the fish, too!
• Alaska: One Fire Away From Exporting Charcoal
• Calif Drought: Schwarzenegger declares a state of emergency
• Images of the Day: California Drought & Folsom Lake

• Desertification
• California ‘Mojavefied’ by 2011?
• Land degradation threatens 1.5 billion people
• Topsoil
• First Wave of World’s Collapsing Cities

• Schwarzenegger Proclaims Water Emergency in Nine Counties
• Drought
• A Few Extreme Events Away
• Image of the Day: Southern Spain
• Schwarzenegger Proclaims Water Emergency in Nine Counties

Only One Guess Allowed!

Who said:

• “I think that ethanol is the most popular whipping boy in the agricultural world at the moment”

• “So to say that biofuels are the culprit clearly underestimates the demand and really shows a gross misunderstanding of the world food situation,”

• “We have to grow more food. We have to increase yields”

Hint: To increase yields, farmers are forced to buy lots and lots more fertilizers!

Related links:

• Fatal Harvest
• Keep Mine free …!
• The Center for Food Safety

Related Reading:

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth One
  Industrial agriculture will feed the world

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Two
  Industrial food is safe, healthy, and nutritious

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Three
  Industrial food is cheap

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Four
  Industrial agriculture is efficient

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Five
  Industrial food offers more choices

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Six
  Industrial agriculture benefits the environment and wildlife

• The Seven Deadly Myths of Industrial Agriculture: Myth Seven
  Biotechnology will solve the problems of industrial agriculture

See the tags for the answer!

Bangladesh coastal population threatend by sea level rise

Country in Focus: Bangladesh

Satellite image of Bangladesh (Photo credit NASA)

Geography

• Land Area: 136,000 km² (US comparative: slightly smaller than Iowa)
  [Global rank by area: 94th]
• Water 10,325 km²
• Coastline: 580 km

Elevation extremes

• Lowest point: Indian Ocean 0 m
• Highest point: Peak, the Mowdok range, 1052m

Most of the country is situated on deltas of large rivers flowing from the Himalayas: the Ganges unites with the Jamuna (main channel of the Brahmaputra) and later joins the Meghna to eventually empty into the Bay of Bengal (Source: CIA, The World Factbook)

Land use

• Arable land: 55.39%
• Permanent crops: 3.08%
• Other: 41.53% (2005)

Map of Bangladesh (Source: CIA, The World Factbook)

Population

• 2007 Estimate: 150,448,340
  [Global Rank by population: 7th]
• Density: 1106/km²
  [Global Rank by population: 11th]
• The population of Bangladesh rose from 75 million in 1971, to more than 150 million in 2007.
• The population is still growing at an annual rate of about 2 percent.

Environmental issues
many people are landless and forced to live on and cultivate flood-prone land; water-borne diseases prevalent in surface water; water pollution, especially of fishing areas, results from the use of commercial pesticides; ground water contaminated by naturally occurring arsenic; intermittent water shortages because of falling water tables in the northern and central parts of the country; soil degradation and erosion; deforestation; severe overpopulation (Source: CIA, The World Factbook)

• About 10 million people are threatened by annual floods and storms.
• About 4,500 people were killed and at least two million were made homeless homeless as a result of two massive floods and a cyclone in 2007.
• Extreme climate events destroyed about 2 million tonnes of rice, the country’s main staple, in 2007.

Ganges River Delta, Bangladesh and India (Image: NASA)

Bangladesh is threatened by

• Climate Change
• Rising population
• Shrinking farmland

3/4 of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, under water (2004)
Bangladeshi Children and adults move through flood stricken areas.
[Photo Credit: University of Alabama]

Related Links:

• Sea level rise in Bangladesh threatens coastal population
• Photo Flood 2000 (15 images)
• Flood 98 – Bangladesh – Photo Gallery (57 images)
• Floods in Bangladesh photo gallery (UNICEF UK)
• In pictures: South Asia flood chaos
• Photo Gallery: Bangladesh