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A nearly dry horseshoe lake at Brazos Bend State Park, Texas (photo by Sarah Zielinski)

“What is this, rain? I was promised a drought,” I joked to a friend as we drove through ten seconds of drizzle this weekend in Houston. I needn’t have worried–the rest of the day was sunny and warm. It was a pleasant diversion from the cooler temperatures of a mid-Atlantic fall, but in Texas, warm and dry has become a real worry. The entire state is in the midst of an exceptionally bad drought, as you’ve probably read in the news. But what does that look like on the ground?

In Houston itself, there isn’t too much evidence of the drought. Sure, the lawns and plants may look a little brown in places, and there’s the occasional sign notifying people of watering restrictions. But if your vision of drought is wildfires or the Sahara Desert, you’re bound to be disappointed.

An alligator suns itself on the edge of Elm Lake (photo by Sarah Zielinski)

Even outside the city things don’t seem so bad at first glance. It’s a bit dusty, and the cows are munching on bits of grass in rather brown fields. When we started walking around Brazos Bend State Park, however, the drought quickly made itself known. One horseshoe lake had water and made a nice home for several alligators, but the other was full of dead vegetation and had only one tiny little patch of water, barely suitable for small birds looking for a drink. The park’s largest body of water, Elm Lake, which appears as a large patch of blue on a map of hiking trails, had shrunk around the edges and the shallow water was often covered in a nasty green algae. On the bright side, the alligators clustered near the water along the edge of the lake, which made them easy for us to find.

The effects of a drought come in ways we often don’t expect. Migrating birds will be fewer in Texas this year, and they’ll have fewer places to stop. That will give hunters fewer opportunities to pursue their hobby. Migrating monarch butterflies will find it more difficult to cross the state on their way to Mexico; they’ve already had a bad year, dealing with the drought in the spring and a cooler summer around the Great Lakes. Cattle ranchers have sold off parts of their herds; with grass and water scarce, and importing hay from other states expensive, they can’t afford to keep so many animals. The price of beef, and other foodstuffs, will likely rise. Even drought-tolerant plants are not immune from a drought this bad. Power generation, heavily dependent on water, could take a hit. Communities are opposing new projects that would use up the little water available.

The last 12 months have been the driest since record-keeping began in 1895. And a few inches of rain will do little to alleviate the precipitation backlog (26 inches in Central Texas). But Texas, even the United States, isn’t alone in this problem. Climate change will likely bring more droughts around the world. As I reported last year in Smithsonian:

Other regions—the Mediterranean, southern Africa, parts of South America and Asia—also face fresh-water shortages, perhaps outright crises. In the Andes Mountains of South America, glaciers are melting so quickly that millions of people in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador are expected to lose a major source of fresh water by 2020. In southwestern Australia, which is in the midst of its worst drought in 750 years, fresh water is so scarce the city of Perth is building plants to remove the salt from seawater. More than one billion people around the world now live in water-stressed regions, according to the World Health Organization, a number that is expected to double by 2050, when an estimated nine billion people will inhabit the planet.

“There’s not enough fresh water to handle nine billion people at current consumption levels,” says Patricia Mulroy, a board member of the Colorado-based Water Research Foundation, which promotes the development of safe, affordable drinking water worldwide. People need a “fundamental, cultural attitude change about water supply in the Southwest,” she adds. “It’s not abundant, it’s not reliable, it’s not going to always be there.”

Water, either too much or too little, is one of the biggest problems we can blame on climate change. At least in places like the United States and Australia, there is enough money for a drought to be no more than an inconvenience. In other parts of the world, however, water problems are going to end in human deaths.

A storm rolls in above Bangkok (courtesy of flickr user Dennis Wong)

I’m kind of obsessed with weather. There’s a practical side to this—I don’t own a car and getting caught in a rain or snow storm can be a problem—but I also a have quite a bit of awe for the power of nature. I once lived on the edge of Tornado Alley, and I’ve experienced ice storms, torrential downpours, high winds, blizzards and hurricanes. I always keep an eye on the weather and have a plan when something bad is predicted or formulate a plan when something bad starts to happen. But I’m realizing that I may be in the minority.

Back in January, a huge ice storm headed towards Washington, D.C. A local weather blog recommended people be off the streets by 4 p.m., but few heeded the warning. They headed out as the ice started to fall and it took some people eight hours or more to get home. If they made it at all.

When a hurricane heads towards land, some people call the local television station to ask if they should be boarding up their houses. And they get angry when the forecast turns out to be wrong, which can easily happen even with all of our modern prediction tools. That is understandable when a storm turns out to be worse than expected, but it can also be dangerous when it goes the other way. How many people who evacuated from New York City prior to Hurricane Irene, which didn’t bring as much flooding to the area as had been predicted, will heed future warnings?

The death toll from the May tornado in Joplin, Missouri was so high, in part, because people didn’t heed the warnings. There had been so many false alarms in the past that they didn’t think it necessary to take shelter.

In August, five people died and dozens were injured when an outdoor stage collapsed at the Indiana State Fair due to high winds. The sky had turned black as a storm rolled in and but few people left.

We have more weather information than at any time in our past. NOAA’s predictions of the paths of hurricanes get better and better. We get warnings that a tornado is headed our way with plenty of time to take shelter. We can learn to make our own predictions from the plethora of raw data available online and even have instant access to weather information on our computers and smartphones.

But that hasn’t made us immune to the dangerous and costly effects of weather. A study earlier this year [PDF] estimated the cost of weather in the United States may be as high as $485 billion a year. “It’s clear that our economy isn’t weatherproof,” says NCAR scientist Jeffrey Lazo, the study’s lead author. “Even routine changes in the weather can add up to substantial impacts on the U.S. economy.”

I don’t mean to imply that all those costs are avoidable, but surely there’s room for improvement, especially when it comes to personal safety. I worry that many people have become so dependent on technology and the forecasts and advice from others (whether professional meteorologists or friends and family) that we don’t look at the skies anymore. The wind kicks up, the skies turn black, and we don’t do anything. We don’t take shelter. We don’t change our schedules. We don’t slow our cars. And it’s no wonder when bad things happen.

What’s to be done? Well, take the time to educate yourself about the warning signs of severe weather. Learn about hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or any other type of weather event that may strike your area before the threat becomes real. Heed the warnings of professionals, even if they later turn out to be false. Take shelter when the weather takes a turn for the worse. Go home early, before a storm begins. And err on the side of caution. Because it’s better to waste a little time and money than end up dead.

A medium-size solar flare with a coronal mass ejection, captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory on June 7, 2011. (credit: NASA/SDO)

UPDATE, March 8, 2012: A powerful storm erupted from the sun on March 6, but as of yet the effects on Earth have been minimal. But is it possible that a future storm could cause serious damage? Read below…

It can take a long time to clean up from natural disasters. New Orleans still had remnants of Katrina damage years after the storm barreled through. Hundreds of thousands of people are still homeless in Haiti, more than a year and a half after its earthquake. Areas of Japan may be off limits for years due to the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster at Fukushima.

But as bad as these events might be, they are at least limited geographically. But that probably won’t be true when it comes to a severe solar storm, say scientists in a new study in Space Weather. Before I go into that, though, let’s first review what I mean by solar storms. These are explosions on the Sun that send energized particles out into space. If Earth is in the way of a mild outburst, we get pretty auroras at the poles. But more violent events can have bigger impacts, as Robert Irion noted earlier this year in his Smithsonian story “Something New Under the Sun“:

The most intense solar storm ever recorded struck in the summer of 1859. British astronomer Richard Carrington observed a giant network of sunspots on September 1, followed by the most intense flare ever reported. Within 18 hours, Earth was under magnetic siege. Dazzling northern lights glowed as far south as the Caribbean Sea and Mexico, and sparking wires shut down telegraph networks—the Internet of the day—across Europe and North America.

A magnetic storm in 1921 knocked out the signaling system for New York City’s rail lines. A solar storm in March 1989 crippled the power grid in Quebec, depriving millions of customers of electricity for nine hours. And in 2003, a series of storms caused blackouts in Sweden, destroyed a $640 million Japanese science satellite and forced airlines to divert flights away from the North Pole at a cost of $10,000 to $100,000 each.

Our modern, globally connected electronic society is now so reliant on far-flung transformers and swarms of satellites that a major blast from the Sun could bring much of it down. According to a 2008 report from the National Research Council, a solar storm the size of the 1859 or 1921 events could zap satellites, disable communication networks and GPS systems and fry power grids at a cost of $1 trillion or more.

These storms are getting more attention in recent months because the Sun has left its solar minimum—its time of least activity—and there are still three to five years until it reaches solar maximum. And although a host of satellites are now watching the Sun, leading to new insight into its activity and, eventually, better warnings of devastating storms, our technological society is still disturbingly vulnerable.

Back to the Space Weather study: Researchers from UCLA and elsewhere used simulations of solar storms to examine what would happen to the Earth’s inner radiation belt, a region of charged particles that surrounds the planet and acts as a buffer against radiation. They found that a storm the intensity of the 2003 event would halve the thickness of the radiation belt and one the size of the 1859 event would nearly wipe it out. And that would just be the beginning of the problem, New Scientist explains:

In the absence of the cloud, electromagnetic waves [would accelerate] large numbers of electrons to high speed in Earth’s inner radiation belt, causing a huge increase in radiation there. The inner radiation belt is densest at about 3000 kilometres above Earth’s equator, which is higher than low-Earth orbit. But the belt hugs Earth more tightly above high latitude regions, overlapping with satellites in low-Earth orbit.

Speeding electrons [would] cause electric charge to accumulate on satellite electronics, prompting sparks and damage. Increasing the number of speeding electrons would drastically shorten the lifetime of a typical satellite, the team calculates.

The satellite-damaging radiation could hang around for a decade, the scientists say. In addition, the radiation could also be hazardous for astronauts and equipment on the International Space Station.

Irene created a new channel across a North Carolina barrier island (courtesy of flickr user NCDOTcommunications)

When I first learned about barrier islands, back in high school, I couldn’t believe that people would live on one. That’s because barrier islands aren’t permanent; they’re just accumulations of sand that form off the coast (many can be found on the U.S. East Coast). And it’s a natural state for these islands to grow and erode and get washed away. A strong enough storm can cut an island in half, as seen after Irene in the photo above, or take away the wide swath of beach that had been between homes and the ocean. What had been prime beachfront property one day can be open ocean the next.

And people can compound the problem. The point of buying beachfront property is to get a great view of the ocean, but destroying the sand dune to get closer to the beach eliminates the feature that protects the beach from erosion. In addition, building jetties and adding sand in attempts to keep an island stable can hasten erosion elsewhere. Building on a barrier island can also limit the island’s usefulness in protecting the mainland coast from powerful storms as well as eliminate important ecosystems, such as dunes and salt marshes.

The best way to limit development on these fragile islands is probably not to outlaw it, though. There’s so much development already on these islands that there’s no possibility of clearing it all away and letting nature take over. But we could add more of these islands to the Coastal Barrier Resources System. People are not prohibited from developing land in this system. Instead, the act that created the system “limits the Federal financial assistance for development related activities such as spending for roads, wastewater systems, potable water supply, and disaster relief,” NOAA explains. In other words, you can build here, but you’re not getting any help from the feds.

As a result of this program, NOAA estimates that U.S. taxpayers saved $1.3 billion between 1982 and 2010. People do build on CBRS land, but it’s more expensive to do so without federal assistance, so less development occurs. And because the land is less developed, these ecosystems often stay intact, providing homes for migratory birds, rare plants and animals. The land is also allowed to grow and erode naturally and serve as the barrier it is meant to be.

Flood debris on the Ohio River is halted by a dam (Photo by Michael Mooney; courtesy of flickr user LouisvilleUSACE)

When the post-hurricane floods drain away, there will be tons of debris left behind. More may be washed away and never seen again. Whole buildings may flow down rivers into the oceans. But what happens then?

Some insight into this phenomenon can be found in Flotsametrics and the Floating World, the 2009 book by oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer and science writer Eric Scigliano:

Today the evening news reports excited on all the houses, cars, and other flotsam washed away in floods. Rarely, however, do we learn what happens afterward to this diluvial debris. Some of the trees washed away in the great 1861-62 flood stranded on nearby shores. Coastal eddies, observable from earth-orbiting satellites, spun others a hundred miles offshore, where the California Current swept them on westward to the Hawaiian Islands. In September 1862, Charles Wolcott Brooks, secretary of the California Academy of Sciences, reported “an enormous Oregon tree about 150 feet in length and fully six feet in diameter about the butt” drifting past Maui. “The roots, which rose ten feet out of water, would span about 25 feet. Two branches rose perpendicularly 20 to 25 feet. Several tons of clayish earth were embedded among the roots”—carrying who knows what biological invaders to vulnerable island habitats.

Any logs that got past Hawaii without being snatched or washed up would, over the next five to ten years, complete a full orbit around the Turtle and/or Aleut gyres.

It might also be possible for flood debris to form a floating island. Not just a fantasy in fiction, floating islands are a fairly common lake phenomena:

The influential early-twentieth-century paleontologist William Diller Matthew estimated that a thousand islands drifted out to sea during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and 200 million during the Cenozoic era. Such islands, formed when soil collects on dense mats of fallen trees and other debris, were known on the lakes of Europe, the marshes of Mesopotamia, and the log-jammed rivers of the Pacific Northwest….Today engineers and harbor authorities clear out such accumulations [from rivers and inlets] before they block passage and menace shipping. But untended, they would pile up until enormous floods washed them out to sea, there to drift, taunting mariners and bedeviling mapmakers, until they broke apart on the waves or crashed onto new shores.

The most famous floating island on the ocean was spotted in the spring of 1892 off the east coast of Florida:

It was a season of extreme weather: hurricanes, tsunamis, and floods violent enough to uproot whole sections of forest. One such section became the only wooded island ever observed transversing an ocean. Thirty-foot trees enable mariners to see it from seven miles away. The U.S. Hydrographic Office feared it would menace transatlantic steamers, and inscribed it on the monthly pilot charts that marked such threats as icebergs, underwater mines, burning vessels, and floating logs. Many captains stared in disbelief when they received their November 1892 chart for the North Atlantic; it showed an island floating in the stream. But this was no cloud or mirage; it had been sighted six times along a 2,248-nautical-mile course.

(Read more about ocean currents and how they brought lost Japanese sailors to America in this except from Flotsametrics.)