Go Green

Rainfall projections for Hurricane Ike, through the weekend.

From National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

From the Oklahoma Mesonet:

By John Sutter

In Sunday’s paper, I wrote about the people of the Oklahoma Panhandle — they’re a gritty, stubborn bunch, who are doing their best to survive a record drought. Last week government forecasters upgraded last week to their most severe category, and old timers comparing the situation to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. (see video at bottom of post; and check out a slideshow with pictures of the drought.)

I talked at length with a man named Millard Fowler, who survived the dirty thirties. He’s 95, and when I tried to call him this afternoon to check in, a friend answered his phone to say Millard was out on his combine, harvesting wheat.

When I last checked in with him on Friday morning, Millard had told me he’d just gotten out of the hospital after having trouble with his heart. He said he was in the hospital overnight, but otherwise was doing just fine. He said he was just getting old.

Then, today, he’s back out on the combine. Friends say he won’t let anyone else touch it.

You find this kind of resiliency, tenacity (even hardheadedness) in many people who live out in Cimarron County, at the western end of the Panhandle. When I first met Millard, we talked for a short while and then I asked him if we could go see his wheat fields, which he says will yield about a third of what they normally do because of the drought. I offered to drive, but he insisted he would. So we hopped in his big, red pickup truck.

“Buckle your seatbelt, you’ll be fine,” the 95-year-old said.

Some people in the Panhandle say this drought will be the end of many farmers and ranchers. Some ranchers already have sold off all of their cattle. Some wheat fields are barren. But there are other locals, like Millard, who downplay the impacts of the drought. Things in the Panhandle have always been hard, they say, and these tough people always seem to find a way to make it through.

They did it during the Dust Bowl, and they’ll do it again now.

Still, even Millard says he’s going to have to lease out his farmland this fall.

He’s getting too old, he said, and it’s too hard to break even without any rain.

As the Economist explains, erratic weather in East Africa has again left Ethiopia in a famine, not one to the level of the mid-80s, but still severe.

The scale of starvation is so large in part because Ethiopia has virtually no business sector. Therefore families have little if any way to save money for hard times — which come in cycles, are tied to the weather, and are likely to become more severe with climate change.

When rains come at the right time, farmers have food. When they don’t — and that happens often — people starve.

Sound familiar? While Oklahoma doesn’t suffer famine like Ethiopia does, many of the state’s farmers depend on weather patterns that, if anything, are predictably extreme. We have decades of droughts and floods. This is the driest start to a year on record in Oklahoma Panhandle, and many farmers are losing their crops or having to sell of cattle.

Climatologists say it’s hard to make region-specific predictions about climate change. But Deke Arndt, the assistant state climatologist, says this year’s patter of eastern Oklahoma being intensely wet and the Panhandle being incredibly dry is consistent with expectations for a warming world.

Farmers I’ve talked to in the Panhandle say they expect good years and bad years, and sometimes they expect the bad years to be so bad that they won’t have crops. It seems like that kind of long-range planning lets them survive. But I wonder what readers think about our dependency on weather to give us food and money. Do we need better planning, and if so, what would that entail?

Here’s an excerpt from the Economist article on Ethiopia:

A famine on the scale of 1984, when Band Aid and Live Aid raised about $150m in relief for Ethiopia, is still unlikely. Logistics and medical understanding have improved. Yet, sadly, some of the conditions that created that famine have not really changed. Ethiopia still has too many people eking out a living on too little land, depending on rains that can never be relied on. Meteorologists say that the problem is not just the amount of rain but the climate’s increasing volatility.

The government has also failed. After several good harvests since the last big famine, in 2003, Ethiopia had a chance to progress. Instead, it dithered over reforms to promote private business and overhaul the country’s sclerotic banking system and mobile-phone sector. Aside from coffee, qat (a narcotic leaf chewed by Somalis), horticulture and a little tourism, Ethiopia is one of Africa’s very few countries that still has virtually no serious private business—and thus few jobs—outside the state sector. Almost three-quarters of the population may be under- or unemployed.

So few families have a chance to save anything for hard times. The lack of wealth creation makes the government more vulnerable to external shocks. The soaring price of oil may cost Ethiopia $1 billion this year—equivalent to its entire foreign-exchange earnings. Meles Zenawi, the prime minister, cannot be blamed for record oil prices or for the rising cost of food worldwide, both of which have sparked riots in several African countries. But he bears some responsibility for failing to increase his country’s hard-currency earnings.

John

Last week, straight-line winds peeled the roofs off of houses in Oklahoma, and now winds are fueling wildfires in western Oklahoma, where a searing drought continues.

Gusts yesterday and today have been near 50 mph. So, for you curios readers out there, I asked a climatologist what makes the wind, and why there’s been so much of it lately.

You can listen to his response on the environment podcast.

For some people, the recent winds have been dangerous and damaging. But they can also be a source of entertainment, sometimes. In downtown Oklahoma City last week I saw attorneys with ties flailing in the air, like they were tied to helium balloons. Workers in business suits buried their heads down and tried in earnest not to fall over. A man’s motorcycle fell on its side in front of the Bricktown Library. Some people just laughed as they tried to swim their way down the streets.

I interviewed a couple of people who were in from out of town, on subjects unrelated to the wind. They would bring the wind up in conversation, though, saying things along the lines of, Man, I knew it was supposed to be windy here (thank you Rodgers and Hammerstein) but this is nuts.

I told them this wind was abnormally strong, even for Oklahoma. But, as you’ll hear in the podcast, the Rocky Mountains are partly to blame for the steady winds that whip across this part of the Great Plains.

John