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

Cyprus Is Collapsing!

Cyprus’ extreme environmental stress may lead to early collapse!

Former offical: “We are going through a visual process of desertification.”

Goto Main Entry >> Cyprus Collapse May Be Imminent!

Related Links:

• Drought
• Worsening Signs of Planetary Stress

• The First Wave of World’s Collapsing Cities

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!

Human-induced Climate Change

“Dust fall” in the West in the last 100 years is up to seven times heavier than at any period in history.

Human activities such as settlement, railroad, industry, farming and ranching has caused a huge increase in the dust levels in the air, according to a report by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

A dusty scene near Canyonlands in Utah. Dust in the West has increased by 500 percent since the 1800s. [Photo Credit: Jason C. Neff, University of Colorado at Boulder. NO copy restriction. Source: eurekalert ]

“The chemical composition of the dust is changing. And it’s changing in a way that we actually see the byproducts of both industrial activity and agricultural activities in the dust. We see elevated phosphorous and we see elevated nitrogen in these lake sediments,” said Neff of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who led the study.

According to another study, published in January, human-caused climate change has altered river flows, snow pack and air temperatures.

“The dust we see in these lakes is the same dust that causes earlier spring snowmelt here, so we can now definitively say that humans are in large part responsible for this melt,” said Neff.

Read more …

Earth, Land, Topsoil

No Good for Farming!

“A [farmer] took up land [in Saskatchewan], dug a cellar and built a frame house on top of it; ploughed up the prairie and grew wheat and oats. After 20 years he decided the country was no good for farming, for eight feet of his soil had gone and he had to climb up into his house.” —Richard St, Barbe Baker, My Life, My Trees [Quoted by John Jeavons in How to Grow More Vegetables]

Land Use and Topsoil

Once A Forest! Photo credit: UNEP

Topsoil

Measuring an average of about 6.6 inches (16.76 centimeters) deep, topsoil is the upper layer of earth’s crust. Topsoil comprises of a mix of humus, mineral and composted materials giving rise to most of the soil’s biological activity and supplying nutrients to plants and therefore to animals. After air and water, topsoil is Earth’s most vital resource.

Topsoil: Wild Facts

Table TS1. Topsoil: Wild Facts
Note: The average bulk density of topsoil is calculated at about 1.4 gcm^-3

Original Entry >> Topsoil