A remarkable story out of Alabama, where Alexander City seems to be quite literally running out of water:

“The water is so low the pumps are shutting down on us,” said Eugene Mahan, superintendent of water treatment for the system, which provides drinking water to about 50,000 to 60,000 people in east central Alabama, including to about 15,100 residents of Alexander City.

“This is not just about recreation, it’s not about washing cars, this is drinking water,” Mayor Barbara Young said. “We’ve got to have some rain.”

The area it’s located is in the southeastern drought bullseye. They’re in remarkably bad shape down there.

Been said before, but bears repeating: Tom Swetnam’s Senate testimony Monday:

Global warming is making Western wildfires worse, a top fire expert told members of the U.S. Senate on Monday.
Combined with a century of firefighting that has left some forests choked and overgrown, along with people building more and more communities at the forests’ edge, the problems “are coming together in a perfect firestorm,” said Tom Swetnam, head of the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Swetnam testified Monday before Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and the other members of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

The highest mountain “tundra” terrains of the Western United States are disappearing because of warming temperatures, according to a new paper by Henry Diaz and Jon Eischeid:

In the last 20 years (1987–2006), rising temperatures have caused a significant fraction of these areas to exceed the 10°C threshold for alpine tundra classification. The result has been a 73% reduction in coverage of this climatic type. The remaining classified alpine tundra in the last 20 years now averages between ?9°C–10°C during the warmest month, so that continued warming past the classification threshold, would imply that areas where this climate type is found today in the West will no longer be present.

Death Valley averages about two inches (50 mm) of rain a year, but it’s been on the dry side there in 2007, making what happened there this week all the more remarkable:

Prior to today the yearly rainfall total in Death Valley was 0.10 of an inch. As of 2 p.m. PT, Death Valley had picked up 0.15 of an inch of rain today.

By the time it was done, according to this week’s drought monitor, the Sept. 22 storm had dropped 0.63 inch (16.5 mm), its biggest rain storm in two years.

Robert Krier has a fascinating piece in this morning’s San Diego Union Tribune suggesting a linkage between arctic melting and drought in the Southwest:

Three years ago, computer forecast models predicted that in 2050, the reduced ice mass would cause climate shifts that would result in a drought in the western United States.

But the ice is melting far faster than climatologists thought it would.

So much ice has disappeared that the Arctic today looks much like what scientists thought it would in 2050. It’s as if the atmosphere hit the fast-forward button.

The predicted climate changes also may have arrived, with much of the West in the midst of the kind of severe drought that geoscientist Jacob Sewall had envisioned for 2050.

The sort of dry spell they’re having in Southern California focuses the mind marvelously. I haven’t gone back and read the Sewall paper (if anyone has, I’d love to hear their thoughts), but this looks like a fascinating line of inquiry. I’ll keep you posted.

From AFP:

Prime Minister John Howard warned against linking Australia’s worst drought on record to doomsday forecasts about climate change Wednesday, saying “a sense of proportion” was needed.