President Obama says the ongoing California drought is an example of what’s in store if we continue to ignore climate change. According to scientists, the relationship between drought and climate change isn’t quite that simple.

California is a beautiful and geographically diverse place. There are few places in the world where you can eat breakfast on the ski slopes and have dinner by the ocean. Sadly, the California of the future might be a very different place. Thanks to below normal levels of rain for the past three years, the California drought has become a statewide emergency worthy of federal attention.

President Obama recently visited the state to observe to discuss how the government will provide assistance to farmers and businesses who are suffering from a lack of water. During a speech, Obama suggested climate change as an explanation for the California drought, an assertion that’s drawn some surprise criticism from the scientific community.

For those who acknowledge human-accelerated climate change, the link seems to make perfect sense. We already know that climate change is driving extreme weather events around the globe. 2013 was tied with 2003 as the fourth-warmest year since records began in 1880, and global temperatures were higher than average for the 37th consecutive year. Where Obama went wrong, however, was framing the relationship between climate change and the California drought as one of cause and effect.

Drought has always been a part of life in the arid Southwest. “…extreme droughts have happened in the state before, and the experts say this one bears a notable resemblance to some of those, including a crippling drought in 1976 and 1977,” reports the New York Times. In light of this history, one can hardly claim that climate change suddenly caused the California drought. What we can say is that climate change is altering and exacerbating normal weather patterns around the world. In essence, climate change isn’t causing the California drought, but it is making a recovery less likely.

Thanks to climate change, any precipitation in California evaporates more rapidly, intensifying the effects of the drought on agriculture in particular. “We are going through a pattern we’ve seen before, but we’re doing it in a warmer environment,” Michael Anderson, the California state climatologist, told NY Times.

Joseph Romm elaborated on this concept in his 2011 literature review in the journal Nature:

“Precipitation patterns are expected to shift, expanding the dry subtropics. What precipitation there is will probably come in extreme deluges, resulting in runoff rather than drought alleviation. Warming causes greater evaporation and, once the ground is dry, the Sun’s energy goes into baking the soil, leading to a further increase in air temperature. That is why, for instance, so many temperature records were set for the United States in the 1930s Dust Bowl; and why, in 2011, drought-stricken Texas saw the hottest summer ever recorded for a US state. Finally, many regions are expected to see earlier snowmelt, so less water will be stored on mountain tops for the summer dry season.”

So yes, semantically Obama was mistaken when he pointed to the California drought as a living example of climate change. But he was absolutely correct in pointing out a relationship between the two–a relationship that’s become dysfunctional thanks to human behavior.

The symptoms of the California drought, contaminated drinking water, food shortages, and threats to energy security: these are indeed waiting for the rest of the world if we refuse to take swift and definitive action on climate change.

Related on Ecosalon

Obama’s State of the Union: Climate Change and Contradictions

Wine Regions and Climate Change: Will We Soon Be Drinking Swedish Pinot?

New Model Predicts Global Warming Will Leave Your Grandkids In Hot Water

Image: jondissed

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10 global events we were all intrinsically part of.

What makes an event memorable? How does a “happening” sear into our collective mindset and take up permanent residence in our hearts and in our souls? Most often, of course, we are not personally there to witness or directly experience occurrences of global importance.

How many of us were in Cairo’s Tahrir square as protests raged earlier this year?

Who among us lost a loved one or ate radioactive food in Japan, or suffered pangs of hunger in East Africa?

In our media-saturated world, memorable events – indeed memories themselves – are delivered to us via an increasingly wide range of words and pictures, bits and bytes, accounts that stream to our attention, some touching us for a moment, some for a lifetime. Here’s a look at our Top 10 (in no particular order), with links to the stories and accounts that made them indelible to us.

1. March of Horrors: Japan’s Suffering

A tsunami generated by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of northeast Japan killed nearly 20,000, caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and triggered a nuclear power plant disaster that unleashed radiation into the environment. Within hours, videos of the unimaginable waves crushing the Japanese shoreline flooded world consciousness via YouTube and other Internet outlets.

2. The Harder They Fall: Arab Spring

Beginning with a small demonstration in Tunisia that grew to topple a regime, flames of unrest spread to Egypt, ousting dictator Hosni Mubarak, and then to Bahrain and Yemen. Eventually Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi would be dead, and even today, Syrian protesters remain caught in a bloody battle with dictator Bashar al-Assad. Did social media enable and perhaps even spark these events?

3. European Disunion: Economic Crisis in the E.U.

The global economic downturn wreaked havoc in the European Union where austerity measures in Greece resulted in riots and protest, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was driven from office, and measures taken by Germany and France exacerbated an ongoing fissure between the E.U. and Britain. Meanwhile, disagreement about how to avoid a catastrophic meltdown flared across the Atlantic, as opinions about what to do remained as numerous as there are pundits and stakeholders.

4. Wanted Dead: American Operation Kills Osama Bin Laden

In May, American helicopters bearing a special operations team raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killing the world’s most wanted terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, whose followers carried out the 9/11 attacks. Within hours his body was buried at sea, and images of the corpse suppressed. Instead, a powerful and now-famous image of White House personnel – including president Barack Obama and Secretary of state Hillary Clinton – remotely watching the mission was made public.

5. The Fruit of Invention: The World Mourns Loss of Apple Founder Steve Jobs

The world lost some great minds to cancer and health issues as 2011 wore on, including writer and polemicist Christopher Hitchens and Czech playwright, dissident and politician Vaclav Havel. But, despite the sense that “it was coming,” the loss that seemed to most deeply move our high-tech world was that of innovator, inventor and Apple Founder Steve Jobs. As news of his death spread across the internet in October – in part via millions of his own inventions – biographer Walter Isaccson’s iBio hit the presses, eventually to set new sales records.

6. From Wall Street to Main Street: Occupiers Take a Stand

Beginning with a September protest in a New York City park near Wall Street, what became known as the “Occupy” movement quickly spread to many major American cities and beyond. The “leaderless” protests are said to represent “the 99 percent” against the richest 1 percent of Americans, who benefit from corporate and political corruption and greed at the majority’s expense. In November, images of a campus police officer at the University of California Davis pepper-spraying students went viral over the internet, instantly becoming a rallying point for the movement.

7. Us vs. Them: Obstructionism Paralyzes Washington

Despite being fractured between party traditionalists and Tea Partiers, a Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives shackled the hands of Democratic President Barack Obama and the Democratic-led Senate. On issues ranging from the economy to the environment, American leaders reached a seemingly endless stream of stalemates. Most notably, the President unveiled a massive jobs bill that was labeled dead-on-arrival by members of both parties. The New York Times commented on the political gamesmanship, and EcoSalon presented the many rifts dividing America.

8. Weather, Weather Everywhere:  Climate Change Marches On

With drought in Texas, killer cyclones in the Philippines, and monster floods in South America and Thailand, 2011 was another year in what seems like an annual escalation of climate change and severe weather. Perhaps the most wrenching weather-related disaster was the return of drought to the Horn of Africa. Data continues to show the impact humans have on the world’s climate, yet deniers continue their war on science. In October, EcoSalon named names.

9. We are the World: All 7 Billion of Us

As the human population reached the 7 billion mark (with 3 billion more projected by the end of the century), debates about resources and birth control reheated. Can our planet sustain such exponential growth? In its inimitable way, National Geographic gave us the story in pictures.

10. Ask and Tell: End of Anti- Gay Military Policy in the American Armed Forces

After 18 years of controversy, the Pentagon repealed its “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in September. After encouraging those who have been expelled under the policy to reenlist, President Barack Obama declared: “We are not a nation that says ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ We are a nation that says ‘out of many, we are one.'” An MSNBC story covered a historic kiss.

Images: TenSafeFrogs, Official U.S. Navy Imagery, S a l e e m – H o m s i, PIAZZA del POPOLO, bkusler, lwpkommunikacio, bogieharmond, Alex Barth, kevin dooley, woodleywonderworks, Beverly & Pack

The post The 10 News Stories of 2011 You Shouldn’t Have Missed appeared first on EcoSalon.

No cloud above, no earth below, A universe of sky and snow. – John Greenleaf Whittier

Here’s how I like to think it happened. Bill Gates is sat at his desk one day, sipping Mountain Dew while grappling with some tricky Windows-based conundrum. A shadow falls across his very expensive notepad: the sun’s gone in. Bill curses, throws his very expensive pen at the wall, and within ten minutes a thousand Microsoft scientists have their orders – “Bill wants the sky brighter!”

I’m being daft, of course: cloud whitening is a well-established part of the controversial scientific body of theory know as geoengineering. The principle is simple. If you dump vaporized water into the clouds, they become fluffier and whiter – i.e., they cover more sky and they reflect more light, blocking incoming sunlight and (in theory) helping fight global warming. However, it’s never actually been tried – until now. As The Guardian reports, the Gates-funded research group Silver Lining is building machines to spray misted seawater into clouds covering a 10,000 kilometer square area of sea, either from ships or wind-powered yachts.

And although it sounds like a Kate Bush video, it’s going to happen if Bill gets his way, that is. Critics point to the fact that we’re deliberately tinkering with a meteorological system we barely understand and are often poorly equipped to defend ourselves against when it turns nasty, which it is more and more frequently). With all the damage we’ve done to the world’s lands and seas, should the skies be made sacrosanct?

Images: francesco sqroi and Michel Filion

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