Word: droughts
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That means climate change isn't a problem for tomorrow; the effects are happening now. Already precipitation patterns seem to be changing, making some drier areas - like the arid American southwest - even drier, and rainy regions even wetter. (Which can be almost as destructive as a drought - last year's record-breaking floods in Britain caused $4 billion worth of damage.) As warmer temperatures creep northward, so do insects and other pests that are adapted to the heat. The results can be harrowing - the population of the tiny mountain pine beetle, which infests pine trees in the Rocky Mountain region...
...leave the state. For the past two years the South Florida Water Management District, reacting to the diluvial warnings, has drained water from Lake Okeechobee, one of the peninsula's most vital hydrosources, to avoid storm flooding. Because the deluges never came, this has helped exacerbate Florida's recent drought...
...drought-stricken Karamoja region of Uganda - an east African country slightly smaller than Oregon, just west of Kenya - St. Kizito is where malnourished children are brought to get better. Locals say this hospital in the town of Matany is the only good one for perhaps 100 miles: no doubt that's one reason why the therapeutic feeding center, as the malnutrition program is called, houses 33 young patients in its one room with eight cots. Inside, a handful of mothers sit and feed the children who are too weak to play, or even...
...drought has also savaged recent Australian wheat crops. Normally among the top three or four wheat exporters in the world, Australia has managed to produce little more than half of its usual 20 million metric tons in each of the past two years. But these setbacks are having a paradoxical effect. Not nearly as thirsty a crop as rice and expensive now on world markets at about $350 a ton, wheat in Australia is attracting new growers. "Some are looking at putting wheat in this year instead of restocking on cattle - because it's cheaper and because they...
...Such cautious optimism doesn't extend to all crops, however. Insiders doubt whether Australia's rice production will ever return to pre-drought levels. Under proposed water-policy reforms, farmers in the Murray-Darling Basin will be subject to tighter restrictions than in the past. "My wife and I are sticking it out," says Ian Brunt. "But we've got three boys with equity in their own farms, and they've had enough and want out. They're sick of drought and sick of the politics of water." Murray Hartin's poem ends happily, with the hero hugging his wife...