With drought in Australia, snakes are on the move:

Although snakes don’t need water because they don’t sweat, Mr Neindorf said they rely on food to keep their fluids at a reasonable level, meaning more of them were on the ground in search of a meal.

“Because conditions have been so dry for such a long time, food is scarce compared to previous years, meaning snakes this year are likely to be more active than in previous years in their search for food,” he said.

(Actually, this is a bit of a bait and switch. Headline notwithstanding, the story actually tells people to expect snakes on the move, but doesn’t seem to offer any evidence that it’s actually happening.)

I ran across an old paper this morning by Vörösmarty and colleagues about the relative importance of increasing water demand vs. climate change over the next quarter century. Their conclusion is that human population growth etc. swamps any possible climate change effect. I’ve blogged about this before, but I was struck by this wonderful sentence fragment: “the socioeconomic equivalent of the Mauna Loa curve, namely, rapid population growth and economic development.” (link added by me)

USGS streamflow data

Reuters reports famine in Afghanistan because of drought:

Some 2.5 million drought-stricken Afghans across much of the country have lost their crops and are facing acute food shortages, international aid group Christian Aid warned on Wednesday in the capital, Kabul.

An assessment carried out by the aid group in 66 villages in the provinces of Badghis, Farah, Faryab, Herat and Ghor, mainly in the northwest, found that many people have lost 70 to 80 percent of their rain-fed crops following too little rain last winter and spring.

It’s worth recalling Mickey Glantz’s observation:

Although many people have been led by their governments and the media to believe that droughts are the primary cause of famines, closer scrutiny of most famine situations uncovers a multistressed political environment, of which drought was but one factor.

Let’s see…. Afghanistan. Multistressed political environment. Hmmm.

Google Earth Snotel

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

As winter progresses, snowpack is one of the key western U.S. drought variables to monitor. Snowpack is an important leading indicator of hydrologic drought (see here for a discussion of various drought definitions and measures) in the coming year. Snow that builds up in the mountains during the winter season becomes a sort of storage reservoir for summer irrigation and water supply.

Tom Pagano at the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Portland, Ore., has spent a lot of time developing useful tools for monitoring snowpack. Last year, he developed a terrific Google Earth tool that provides a window into the NRCS Snotel data. The Snotel stations are telemetered, automated weather and snowpack condition monitoring sites – how much snow has just fallen, how much is on the ground there now, etc. You can pull back and get a good region-wide idea of what’s going in, or zoom in to the particular mountain range of interest to you.

It’s too early in the season for this data to be very meaningful, but by December or January the Snotel data is worth watching. And it’s fun to watch even now.

In a New York Times interview, Peter A. Darbee, CEO of Pacific Gas and Electric in California, makes the business case for getting on board with his state’s greenhouse gas reduction initiative:

Rather than sitting there and denying that global warming is a problem and climate change is a problem, my reaction was to accept it and to go with the flow to understand the trend, and then say, how can I position PG&E to deal with that challenge, and then how can I turn a challenge into an opportunity.

Darbee points out the historical folly of the argument that emissions standards in California will weaken the state’s economy:

In the past, California has stepped out and been a leader on environmental legislation, and its economy has continued to grow probably faster than the average state economy in the United States. California will find a way to continue to grow, notwithstanding this piece of legislation.

Sir John Houghton argues that drought is the biggest climate change threat in the developing world:

“It’s the extremes of water which are going to provide the biggest threat to the developing world from climate change,” he said.

“Without being able to be too specific about exactly where, droughts will tend to be longer, and that’s very bad news. Extreme droughts currently cover about 2% of the world’s land area, and that is going to spread to about 10% by 2050.”

In his ongoing drought series, Daniel Collins had a nice post last week on a trio of studies about the relationship between climate variability and both recruitment and death of piñon, the scraggly little arid pine tree provides our landscape’s signature here (when drought or global warming isn’t killing it).

I’d like to extend the discussion with reference to a paper that came out in 2000 in ecology that sheds some interesting light on what happens at the tree-by-tree scale rather than the landscape scale discusssed in the papers Daniel cited. It’s Tree-ring variation in pinyon predicts likelihood of death following severe drought. The research team, led by Kiona Ogle (at Northern Arizona at the time, now at Wyoming) compared tree rings in trees that survived a 1996 drought and those that died.

One of the characteristics of the arid climate in which piñon live is variability – significant differences between the wet years and the dry years. You can think of it, in statistical terms, as having a large standard deviation relative to the mean. Wet places, say a place like southeast Louisiana, which gets 60 inches (150 cm) a year of rain, have relatively low variability. The driest year on record in the U.S. climate division data for southeast Louisiana saw 66 percent of the yearly average precipitation. Yuma, the canonical dry as dust U.S. city, has huge variability. The driest year in the U.S. climate division data for southwest Arizona (Yuma) was just 17 percent of average. So things living in arid climate have to not only be adapted to less water in general, but also to really dry extremes. Piñon country is arid, having generally high variability.

Life at all scales – organizations, communities, individuals, societies – need the flexibility to handle that variability. Ogle found a clear difference between the trees that lived and those that died. The dead trees tended to have much greater variability in their growth rings, putting on much fatter rings in wet years relative to their dry year rings. I think there’s an important message here, by way of metaphor, for human societies. If you look at societies that have flourished and those that have failed, a distinguishing characteristic is the way they responded to the wet side of the natural range of variability.