Fighting Drought Years
Climate change has caused some areas to see their
climate take the form of lost summers, floods and
hurricanes. In other places, the rain has been
very stubborn and refuses to fall at all. This is
especially worrisome in areas that have never
needed summer irrigation before. Retrofitting an
entire company with the irrigation equipment
previously reserved for very high value crops is
not an option considering current and likely future
commodity crop prices. When growing maize for
a gas tank, for instance, it doesn’t make sense
to waste valuable water and resources when crop insurance allows
you to simply till it under and wait until next year.
However, irrigation in one form or another might become a practical
necessity in the Mid-west, just as it has been for a very long time in
the arid West. Homeowners and farmers alike need to compete for water
during drought years. As has been evidenced by conditions during the
100-year drought that has continued for several years in Australia,
extreme droughts can bring on some very unusual behaviors in the local
wildlife as well as the populace.
According to BBC News, “The Australian of the year 2007, environmentalist
Tim Flannery, once predicted that Perth, in Western Australia, could become
the world’s first ghost metropolis, its population forced to abandon the city
due to lack of water.” It has been cited that the populace of Perth outpaces
the rest of Australia in terms of water usage. And, in general, Australia
accounts for a large percentage of global energy consumption.
“Climatologists tell us that it is the most profoundly affected city in the
world. People have accepted that it is climate change. In other parts of
the world people are thinking it’s something that’s going to happen to them
in the next 10 or 30 years and that they’ve got time to adjust. We’ve found
we’ve been living with it for 30 years now and we’re having to adjust very
quickly.” In relation to Perth, Don McFarlane, of the Commonwealth
Scientific Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), had this to say.
Consider this quote taken from WikiPedia. “By far the largest part of
Australia is desert or semi-arid lands commonly known as the outback. A
2005 study by Australian and American researchers investigated the
desertification of the interior, and suggested that one explanation was
related to human settlers who arrived about 50,000 years ago. Regular
burning by these settlers could have prevented monsoons from reaching
interior Australia. In June 2008 it became known that an expert panel had
warned of long term, maybe irreversible, severe ecological damage for the
whole Murray-Darling basin if it does not receive sufficient water by
October. Australia could experience more severe droughts and they could
become more frequent in the future, a government-commissioned report said
on July 6, 2008.”
On a related note, consider Lake Chad in Africa. It supplies water to four
bordering countries. When surveyed in the early 1800’s, it was one of the
largest lakes in the world. It nearly dried up twice in the 1900’s. It is
said to be presently only an average of 5 feet deep. Since the 1960’s, it
has shrunk in size by 95%.
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