Climate Change & Disappearing Glaciers,  Looking Back at the United States,  Peru's Andes Mountains

California to Die of Thirst Like Coastal Peru?

image courtesy L.A. Times blog

Word has been out for a while that dwindling meltwater from Peru’s tropical glaciers will lead to dire water shortages in 40 years unless radical measures are taken to find and conserve new sources. Most of the water used along Peru’s coastal region, including Lima, originates in the glaciers of the Andes, which are receding due to rapid climate change.

Climate patterns in the southern hemisphere, however, don’t worry most U.S. citizens, who mistakenly believe that their own lives will be minimally impacted by climate change. 

Changes are coming sooner than they think.

In his first interview, the U.S. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu is predicting the end of California agriculture and the onset of catastrophic drought in California by the year 2100 unless measures are taken, reports the action group Stop Global Warming:

As the Los Angeles Times reported, “Chu warned of water shortages plaguing the West and Upper Midwest and particularly dire consequences for California, his home state, the nation’s leading agricultural producer. In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.”

“I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,” Chu said. “We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.” And, he added, “I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going either.”

Read the entire interview with Chu.

I’m gratified that Chu is putting climate change at the top of the country’s list of priorities.  Perhaps now the United States will join the rest of the developed world and take action against this national and global threat. It starts with citizens accepting in their “gut,” as Chu says, that really bad events can and will unfold in their own environment.

California is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change because much of it is desert irrigated by Sierra meltwater. In the worst case scenario, 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear by the end of the century, which would end farming in California and would imperil life in the cities as well.

While most Americans give little thought to their water supply, writer Joan Didion argues in her 1979 essay “Holy Water” that native Californians obsess over it:

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. …As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale.

What once appeared to be the private obsessions of a brilliant writer are now emerging as the concerns of the entire U.S. nation.

California and coastal Peru. Two desert regions that hug the Pacific, are prone to earthquakes, and depend on the melting drip of mountain glaciers to the east.

Two regions that could die of thirst by the end of the century, unless (to quote the American poet Karl Shapiro) we find new ways to “flood the daylong valleys like the Nile.”

Here is the complete poem by Shapiro, “California Winter,” for those of you like poetry that is both hopeful and dark:

California Winter

It is winter in California, and outside
Is like the interior of a florist shop:
A chilled and moisture-laden crop
Of pink camellias lines the path; and what
Rare roses for a banquet or a bride,
So multitudinous that they seem a glut!

A line of snails crosses the golf-green lawn
From the rosebushes to the ivy bed;
An arsenic compound is distributed
For them. The gardener will rake up the shells
And leave in a corner of the patio
The little mound of empty shells, like skulls.

By noon the fog is burnt off by the sun
And the world’s immensest sky opens a page
For the exercise of a future age;
Now jet planes draw straight lines, parabolas,
And x’s, which the wind, before they’re done,
Erases leisurely or pulls to fuzz.

It is winter in the valley of the vine.
The vineyards crucified on stakes suggest
War cemeteries, but the fruit is pressed,
The redwood vats are brimming in the shed,
And on the sidings stand tank cars of wine,
For which bright juice a billion grapes have bled.

And skiers from the snow line driving home
Descend through almond orchards, olive farms.
Fig tree and palm tree – everything that warms
The imagination of the wintertime.
If the walls were older one would think of Rome:
If the land were stonier one would think of Spain.

But this land grows the oldest living things,
Trees that were young when Pharoahs ruled the world,
Trees whose new leaves are only just unfurled.
Beautiful they are not; they oppress the heart
With gigantism and with immortal wings;
And yet one feels the sumptuousness of this dirt.

It is raining in California, a straight rain
Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,
Filling the gardens till the gardens flow,
Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,
Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green,
Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile.

Karl Shapiro

 Links:

CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACT ON THE WATER RESOURCES FROM THE MOUNTAINS IN PERU
by Pierre Chevallier, Bernard Pouyaud and Wilson Suarez (Global Forum on Sustainable Development, Paris, Nov. 11-12, 2004)

Holy Water (1979), essay by Joan Didion

Quit Spewing Out Greenhouse Gases, America

Global Warming Claims Another Peruvian Glacier

I am an American writer who lived in Lima for seven years (2007-2014), where I covered Andean traditions, melting glaciers and daily life in the capital for Miami Herald, MSNBC and Huffington Post. I now live and work in northern Florida where I champion climate change advocacy and compassionate, affordable eldercare.