The Op-Ed page of the New York Times asked writers from Switzerland, California, Australia, and Israel to file brief reports on the weather and climate in their part of the world. Here are brief excerpts from each, along with links to the articles.
That’s the first thing the mountains teach us: a mixture of reverence and humility. Only the beginner thinks they can be mastered. The glaciers may melt, the rock faces may break apart, the slopes may slide, but the mountains will still be there long after we have vanished from the earth. (Peter Stamm, The great Swiss meltdown)
There is no better year for farming in California than the first year of a drought. The lakes and reservoirs still hold ample water from the year before, and the farmer can go about his chores without inconvenient rains confounding his schedule. Sunlight pours down from a cloudless sky. The crops prosper. Life is good...But there is a dark side to this. If the first year of a drought is a gift, the second year is a worry, and the third year is a crisis. That crisis has a twist to it. In the third year, the lakes and reservoirs are empty, and not only is water in short supply, but so is electricity, for with empty reservoirs there is no flowing water to turn the hydroelectric turbines. We get power failures that frustrate irrigation and every other sort of industry. The farmers age a lot in those years.(Mike Madison, Sunny California)
Australia is suffering what some are calling its worst drought in 1,000 years, and the impact on our farmers, livestock and produce is catastrophic. Scientists have linked the six-year drought to the changing climate, and the dry spell has been especially hard on the Murray cod’s home, the Murray-Darling river basin in southeastern Australia, which provides 40 percent of the country’s food. Our water is slowly running out, and the effects are being felt by Australian chefs.(Justin North, Dining in a drought in Australia)
The problem is that the Jordan River, the Dead Sea’s principal tributary, is a trickle once it reaches the sea because Israel, Jordan and Syria siphon off 95 percent of the water for drinking and for irrigation. Over the past century, the water’s surface has dropped 80 feet; in the last two decades, the sea has shrunk by a third. Sinkholes have caved into the former seabed, and its water has become saltier, strangling even the unique one-celled microbes that long ago adapted to this poisonous environment.(Haim Watzman, Israel's incredible shrinking sea
Read all of them.
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