Used with permission of DW.
It seems no one told these water managers from California to Germany to Afghanistan about the importance of distraction, sugarcoating, and when politically needed, bold-faced lies.
In a more serious tone, the desperation reminds me of when William Shatner, Star Trek’s original Captain James Kirk, in 2015 wanted a water pipeline from Seattle to Lake Mead since California had a widely-reported year of above-ground-water left. March 20 of that year, LA Times reporter Tony Barboza, citing NASA Jet Propulsion senior water scientist and UC Irvine professor Jay Famiglietti (also in the above video), noted, “decades worth of groundwater remain [unless rate of use increases].” July 28, 2022, Famiglietti, now a hydrologist who directs the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, was quoted in a phys.org article by Elizabeth Weise, “The speed at which the severity of the drought increases, the pace of groundwater depletion, the pace at which ice is melting, these are all things that are changing much faster than we can keep up with.” In the same article, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said, “We need to have greater imaginations when thinking about the hazards. We need to be thinking about climate change everywhere all the time in the context of all the infrastructure we have, both existing and especially new.”
This is like a comment by British climate scientist and University of Manchester professor Kevin Anderson in a recent video, “Even if it’s more expensive, let’s put in the infrastructure that can both deal with 1.5 [C over 1850 preindustrial level] but also deal with, say what looks like, 3 degrees centigrade of warming in our local environment [over 1850 preindustrial level].” This idea fits UK meteorologist John Hammond’s comments linked in my previous post regarding what became a UK record-breaking heatwave of 104.4 degrees Fahrenheit (40.2 degrees Celsius) at London’s Heathrow Airport, “[ . . . ] potentially railway lines becoming buckled, and lots of infrastructure disruption. Am I going to get to work? Should I be getting to work?”
The same idea of preparing for 3 degrees centigrade of warming could be useful for businesses, nonprofits, hospitals, colleges and universities, homeowners, and concerned citizens, given fast rate of icemelt in the Arctic and Antarctic which may soon leave darker surfaces, and therefore accelerated warming, with or without much feared, but controversial, potential huge methane releases.
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