California drought: 'May have to migrate people'

Mark Koba in CNBC: It's going from worse to worst each week in California. Suffering in its third year of drought, more than 58 percent of the state is currently in "exceptional drought" stage, according to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor map. That marks a huge jump from just seven days ago, when about 36 percent of the state was categorized that way.

Exceptional drought, the most extreme category, indicates widespread crop and pasture losses and shortages of water in reservoirs, streams and wells.

If the state continues on this path, there may have to be thoughts about moving people out, said Lynn Wilson, academic chair at Kaplan University and who serves on the climate change delegation in the United Nations.

"Civilizations in the past have had to migrate out of areas of drought," Wilson said. "We may have to migrate people out of California." Wilson added that before that would happen, every option such as importing water to the state would likely occur— but "migration can't be taken off the table."

The drought has nearly depleted the state's surface water—which is seen being reduced by about one-third this year. Farmers in California have turned to groundwater to keep crops irrigated. That has led to fears of depleted groundwater in the years ahead if that continues, according to a report released earlier this month.

"So far, groundwater has helped get crops to market and keep food prices in line," said Jay Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis, which released the report....

The July 29, 2014 US Drought Monitor for the western US. Red is "extreme drought" and brown is "exceptional drought"

Pakistan has only 30 days of water reserves

Saleem Shaikh and Sughra Tunio at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: Inadequate planning is exposing Pakistan to water-related threats from climate change and putting the country’s agriculture, industry and hydropower at risk, water experts say. Speaking at a water summit in Pakistan recently, they said the country desperately needs more reservoirs to increase its water storage capacity, and they called for conservation awareness campaigns, the introduction of drought-tolerant crop varieties and more economical irrigation.

 “The country is gravely vulnerable to water-related (effects) of the changing weather patterns,” said Pakistan’s minister for planning, development and reform, Ahsan Iqbal, in a keynote address at the summit in the nation’s capital. In December, the World Resources Institute ranked Pakistan among the 36 most water-stressed countries in the world.

Iqbal said that Pakistan needs a minimum storage capacity of 40 percent of the around 115 million acre-feet of water available in the Indus river system throughout the year. But the country’s storage capacity is only 7 percent and is decreasing due to sediment build-up in reservoirs. This gives Pakistan a stored water supply, adequate to meet its needs, of just 30 days. By contrast, “carryover capacity” in other countries ranges from 200 days in India to 1,000 days in Egypt, he said.

“In Pakistan, planners and policy makers across different sectors, including agriculture and industry, energy and health now have ... a daunting challenge before them of increasing the country’s water storage capacity,” Iqbal said....

The capacity of Khai dam in Pakistan, shot by Syed Usman Ali, Wikimedia Commons, public domain 

Taiwan evacuates 2,000 tourists as super-typhoon looms

Terra Daily via AFP: Taiwan evacuated more than 2,000 tourists on Thursday as the island braced for super-typhoon Soulik with authorities warning of fierce winds and torrential rains. The typhoon, packing gusts of up to 227 kilometres (140 miles) per hour, was 960 kilometres east of the island's southernmost tip as of 0300 GMT, Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau said.

Soulik is moving west-northwest towards Taiwan at about 22 kilometres per hour and could narrowly skip or make landfall in the north of the island sometime between late Friday and Saturday morning, the bureau said. "The public must heighten their vigilance as the typhoon will certainly bring strong winds and heavy rains," a weather forecaster told AFP.

Authorities on Thursday evacuated 2,300 tourists from Green Island, off the southeastern city of Taitung, and issued a warning to ships sailing north and east off Taiwan to take special precaution. The Hong Kong Observatory has classified Soulik as a "super typhoon" on its website, while Taiwan's weather bureau listed it as a "strong typhoon"...

Typhoon Soulik on July 9, via NASA

Silence shrouds Antarctic dig

The Telegraph (Australia): A team of Russian scientists has gone quiet as they race against winter to uncover an ancient Antarctic lake.

The group from Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) have been drilling for weeks in an effort to reach isolated Lake Vostok, a vast, dark body of water hidden 4000m below the surface of the continent. Lake Vostok has not been exposed to air in more than 20 million years.

The team's last contact with colleagues in the outside world was six days ago, and scientists from around the globe are unsure of the fate of the mission - and the scientists themselves - as Antarctica's deadly winter draws near.

"When you're outside, it's extremely cold - minus 30, minus 40," microbiologist Dr David A Pearce said. "If you left your eyes open the fluid in them would start to freeze. Your nostrils would start to freeze. The moisture in your mouth would start to freeze."

Dr Pearce heads a team from the British Antarctic Survey on a competing mission, set to plumb the depths of Lake Ellsworth, one of a string of more than 370 lakes beneath Antarctica that may soon see light for the first time for eons. But time is running out for the Russian scientists....

A scene at Bellingshausen, a Russian Antarctic base on King George Island (far from the site for the Lake Vostok dig, I believe), shot by Loranchet, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Drought forces Texas town to truck in water

CBS News via AP: Tanker trucks loaded with water have become the lifeline for a Texas lakefront village that came precariously close to becoming the state's first community to run out of drinking water during a historic drought.

Spicewood got its first delivery of water Monday under dark clouds and rain. The 8,000-gallon water delivery arrived after it became clear the village's wells could no longer produce enough water to meet the needs of the Lake Travis community's 1,100 residents and elementary school, said Clara Tuma, spokeswoman of the Lower Colorado River Authority.

The town uses wells, not the nearby lake, for its drinking water. Ryan Rowney, manager of water operations for the authority, said it plans to truck water into the Central Texas town for several more weeks while exploring alternatives, including drilling a new well or piping water from Lake Travis. But the agency doesn't want to rush into any project, and prefers for now to pay $200 per truckload of water while ensuring the tens of thousands of dollars it will cost to find a permanent solution are well-spent.

Several towns and villages in Texas have come close to running out of water during the driest year in Lone Star State history, but until now none has had to truck in water. Most found solutions to hold them over, often paying tens of thousands of dollars to avoid hauling water, a scenario that conjures up images from the early 1900s, when indoor plumbing was a novelty....

A water tower in Smyer, Texas, shot by Leaflet, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Climate change fears spark £3.2m investment in new Norfolk fire kit

Dan Grimmer in the Norwich Evening News (UK): Fire chiefs have revealed how they are having to spend £3.2m on the fire engine equivalents of “a Swiss Army Knife” because climate change is causing more floods and heath blazes in Norfolk.

The county’s fire and rescue service is investing millions of pounds in a dozen new fire appliances because the traditional two wheel drive vehicles are no longer always up to the increasingly challenging jobs which firefighters are called out to.

Fire chiefs say climate change means cases of flooding and fires on Norfolk heath land in drier summers are on the increase. And that means the service needs vehicles more suitable for coping with such incidents, according to fire bosses.

That’s why 10 new 4x4 engines are being brought in, along with two heavy rescue pumps, which help deal with road crashes. Norfolk’s assistant chief fire officer Roy Harold said: “What we wanted was a Swiss Army Knife of fire engines, something with the capacity and flexibility to cope with the challenges we face.

...“We have done a great deal of work mapping risk patterns and the changing risk profile in our county. These 10 fire engines are much better suited to deal with incidents involving flooding, heath land and forestry.”...

A Volvo FL6 Fire Engine for the Hampshire Fire & Rescue Serive, England. Shot by deltaalpha24, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Situation in Pakistan's flood-hit areas to grow worse in winter unless aid is provided

Owais Jafri in the Express Tribune (Pakistan): Pakistan Humanitarian forum expressed their fears that an under resourced relief effort would leave several million people with little or no aid, and a situation about to grow worse with the winter season.

The Pakistan Humanitarian Forum (PHF), a network of the 41 largest international charities currently operating in the country, said more than five million people had been affected by the floods “about half of them children” they said.

Around 700,000 people remain displaced, and at least six million acres of ravaged land, PHF said in a new report. PHF urged donors to provide timely and adequate support for an expansion of the relief and recovery effort by rapidly and substantially increasing funds for the UN flood appeal.

Donors should place disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation principles at the heart of their strategies for both relief and development, in line with the Global Platform on Risk Reduction, including allocating at least 10 per cent of humanitarian and recovery spending to DRR, it said....

A robotic team for emergencies

Some typically cool research from the Fraunhofer Institute (Germany): Earthquaks, tsunamies, hurricanes – natural disasters always catch us by surprise, no matter how many early-warning systems are in place. This makes it all the more important for rescue teams to get a quick overview of the situation at hand. In SENEKA, a Markets Beyond Tomorrow project, Fraunhofer researchers are working to network the various robots and sensor systems first responders use so that they can react more quickly and efficiently in the case of an emergency to search for victims and survivors.

... Because every minute counts when the work of saving lives is concerned, robot-supported systems are increasingly used to accelerate search operations. According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), the rate of growth in the use of these helpers is expected to increase to 17 percent by 2013. The experience of the past several years also shows that the impact of special robots is very minor because individual devices and systems often cannot function with one another in the field.

In the „Sensor Network with Mobile Robots for Disaster Management“ project, Fraunhofer scientists from a variety of disciplines have teamed up to solve this problem and develop a system that can effectively network all kinds of robots and sensors with one another.

...After disaster strikes, first responders must first get an overview of the area involved. Existing maps and data are useful, but only up to a point if there are no more buildings standing and roads have been blocked or destroyed. The helpers have to reorient themselves, and the only way to accomplish this is with the aid of technical equipment.

... Once potential victims and have been located, the second step consists of mission planning. For this stage, the scientists want to create a system design to provide dynamic networking of all team members. People and robots need to be coordinated – to ensure that the right tools make it to the right location, for instance. This must be possible on an „as-needed“ basis, even if the surroundings change – due to collapsing buildings or aftershocks. Still, robots should be able to find their way through the rubble, usually without collisions. „The network must be robust but flexible at the same time, and dynamically modifiable. Circumstances can change very quickly in danger zones,“ Helge-Björn Kuntzee explains of the high demands involved. To keep all responders linked despite extreme conditions, the scientists are developing their own protocol technologies combining conventional WLAN technology with standards of their own...

Non-robotic air raid precautions dog 'Rip' sits on top of a pile of brick rubble and timber, following a 1941 air raid in Poplar, London

US northeast prepares for biggest hurricane threat since 1985

Esmé E. Deprez and Henry Goldman in Bloomberg News: ...New York City began evacuating the sick and elderly from low-lying areas as Hurricane Irene threatened to inflict the worst destruction in the Northeast since Hurricane Gloria in 1985. New York, New Jersey and Delaware prepared for the possibility of mass evacuations. The storm may affect more than 65 million people from North Carolina to Maine, or 1 in 5 Americans, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered hospital patients and people in nursing homes and senior housing in coastal areas moved to higher ground. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the busiest U.S. transit system, said bus and subway service may be suspended tomorrow as the storm nears.

“This is the day that people ought to be buying food, water and batteries,” Delaware Governor Jack Markell said yesterday on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness With Margaret Brennan.”

Markell declared a state of emergency, as did Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue and Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell. The declarations free up state resources to be spent on storm-related expenses....

This panoramic view of recently-formed Hurricane Irene was acquired by the crew of the International Space Station early Monday afternoon from a point over the coastal waters of Venezuela. At the time Irene was packing winds of 80mph and was just north of the Mona Passage between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Although no eye was visible at this time, the storm was strengthening and exhibited the size and structure of a classic "Cape Verde" hurricane as it tracked west-northwestward towards the southern Bahamas.