Today, Explained - Dry Hot American Summer

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

As the world heats up, the American West is drier than at any period in the past 1,200 years. But don’t expect people to stop watering their lawns. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Summertime ain't what it used to be. By this point, we've grown accustomed to the fires, the dire warnings, even the deaths. But now roads are melting. It's so hot in the UK, all flights into Luton Airport have to be diverted when the tarmac actually melted. We're discovering bodies. A woman walking on the newly uncovered mud

found a barrel with human remains inside. The person had a gunshot wound and had likely been in the barrel since the late 1970s or early 80s. There's a ghost town? Police also believe they are going to find more bodies here because there is no end in sight to that mega drought that's causing this water level to fall. But we're still having trouble convincing people to water their lawns less. That's coming up on Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express.

Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Today explained to Sean Ramos from we as a people have a whole lot of differences, but we're all united by our biggest problem, the warming climate. It's a problem so immense, people feel hopeless and helpless to turn the tide. But you got to start somewhere, and that somewhere might literally be just outside your front door. We have lawns turning brown.

Kaylee Wells covers climate for KCRW Public Radio in Los Angeles. Lately, she's been covering lawns. Millions of us started facing outdoor water restrictions at the beginning of June. We've been restricted to only be able to water them once or twice per week. Now, lawns might feel irrelevant in light of wildfires and dust storms and death, but lawns are one of the few luxuries Americans are being asked to sacrifice as the world literally burns. I think that's true. I mean, yes, the only thing that's really getting restricted for most of us right now is outdoor irrigation, and that doesn't sound like a big deal, but usually that means that it's the first thing in possibly more steps to come as the summer gets hotter and

the rain doesn't come. Governor Newsom said that the state could impose mandatory water restrictions and a full outdoor watering ban across the state as soon as September. The lack of rainfall is leaving fields so dry that crops are dying before they can be harvested. Farm workers are leaving the region in droves to find sustainable jobs. So what are the rules in Los Angeles where you're based? Well, it depends on where you live. We're talking about Southern California in general. Some cities aren't feeling it at all because the restrictions are coming from what's known as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which is sort of an umbrella district that a lot of local districts

like mine fall under. Even if your city does fall under those restrictions, though, your local water district has to curb their water use by 35 percent and they can choose how to do that. So for one of the strict ones, it actually means if you don't comply, they're going to install a water flow device. So all of a sudden your showers are very unpleasant. It sounds like this is creating a system of haves and have-nots. Yes, but it's not sort of the more traditional system of if you're in a wealthier, whiter neighborhood, then you have. And if you are not, you do not.

It really just depends on where your city happens to get its water. If it gets more of it from the State Water Project and the Colorado River, it's problematic. If it happens to sit on a great aquifer like the city of Downey, which is southeast of Los Angeles, primarily people of color live there, they're fine. So it's kind of more luck of the draw. Are people flouting the water restrictions? There are some people who are flouting the water restrictions. There are threats of warnings and fines if you don't comply. But there are some people who have decided it's worth the fine to keep the lawn green. So that includes this one guy I spoke to, Michael Austin, who boasts that his yard is very green and very wet, and he says that he waters it about 10 minutes every day. I'd say it's a very unique and fresh mix for Southern California.

Very green and very wet. I'm going to go before the lawn is. They're going to take me away, and this is going to be an empty property before the lawn goes. Wow. Michael sounds like he's ready to die for his lawn. I know it's quite a hill to die on, but he wants to die on a very green hill. Oh, amen. Yes, he does. I'd like to say a yard is the reflection of who lives here because we're given these portions of land. We own these portions of land. I think that it's our God-given duty to tend it until it until our time is gone. Did he say it's his God-given duty to tend to his lawn until he dies? He did. He also told me that, you know, it's not his fault that the population in Southern California has grown, and it's not his fault that the climate is changing, so he shouldn't be the one to have to bear the responsibility for it.

And surely there are other people who are making the sacrifice, who are committed to having a, you he, a couple years ago, ripped up all of his lawn and he replaced it with native plants. So in the two years that he's had his landscape, while Michael Lawson is watering it 10 minutes every day, he's watered it six times total in two years. Huh. The plants in here are mostly all chaparral or coastal sage scrub. And particularly the chaparral plants tend to throw deep roots looking for water. And so the more water we can put in the soil during the rainy season, the more access they'll have to it three, four, five feet down. The birds in the background sound happy. Did it look like a nice garden?

Oh my gosh, yes. So if Michael Austin's was a painting to walk into of beautiful green lush landscaping, his felt like a celebration of nature. I loved being there. We don't need to water all the time. Water less frequently and more deeply. That's better for the plants. A little sprinkle every day is terrible. What about like mega water users like, I don't know, golf courses in Southern California? What are they doing right now? I was able to speak with a golf course representative and they said that one of their strategies is to sort of brown the edges to prioritize keeping the fairway green so they're not losing business, even though it probably doesn't look as nice. But even if you're not a golfer like me, and golf is not a huge part of your life, cemeteries are. And I spoke to someone named Bruce Lazenby at Rose Hills Memorial Park in a city right outside of Los Angeles here, and they started using recycled water because

they said they couldn't let their lawns turn brown. People want to come here. They come here to visit their loved ones or do memories or just to be comforted. So I think the park-like environment is what they expect. We can't let this place turn brown. Not everybody can afford that kind of infrastructure of getting all of this recycled water to their many, many acres of property. And I went to an old cemetery that falls into that boat. This place was called Lincoln Memorial Park and they don't even have sprinklers. So this is literally a guy during his allocated 20 minutes twice a week who's going around with a hose, watering as much as he can in his time period. His name is John Michael Mintz, and he

says that people are not happy with the way it's looking these days. People have gone to the Department of Consumer Affairs complaining that the cemetery is dry. If you'd asked me 10 years ago, would you bury somebody here? Well, yeah, this is a beautiful place. But it's gone to seed. What's going on is just heartbreaking. I mean, it sounds like this is heartbreaking right now for people like Mike and for people visiting the cemetery and certainly for Michael Austin, who's, you know, trying to exercise his God-given duty to water his lawn. But this stands to get a lot worse in the coming years, no?

We know that it can get worse, and federal water officials keep warning us that Colorado river cuts are on the way, and we rely a lot on that down here. And if the drought continues to get worse, these water ordinances have plans in place to cut back more. So the water restrictions in place now are really just the first step. Okay, so all told, it sounds like despite this situation in Southern California

and this increasingly grim mega drought situation in the American West from Colorado to Nevada to Utah to California, there hasn't really been a shift in philosophy yet, at least where you report in Los Angeles. I think that is true for a lot of people. That being said, though, we did face more strict restrictions before and people really did rally around them. And we really did meet our water reduction goals before. And we did stop watering lawns and they did turn brown. And we know that Southern Californians can survive that reality. So, yes, I think people are hesitant to recognize that we are heading that way, but we've been there before and we know that we can get out on the other side. Kaylee Wells, KCRW, Los Angeles. But it's not just Los Angeles.

The American West is desperately short on water. More on the mega drought in a minute on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it.

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Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. So if you look at the drought map of the United States, it looks like most of the West Coast and Southwest are painted in shades of orange to magenta, showing the degrees of deepening drought. This is Rachel Becker. She reports on water at CalMatters. At the beginning of July, 39 states were seeing moderate drought or worse. That means 118 million people in the U.S. whose homes and yards and jobs

and crops are parched right now. You can see swaths of severe, extreme, or even exceptional drought, which is the most dire drought category, kind of creeping its way across the country from California and Oregon to Nevada. Nevada lawmakers declaring a war on useless grass in an effort to conserve water. Utah and a vanishing Great Salt Lake. The Great Salt Lake in Utah is shrinking and the state could face an environmental nuclear bomb. Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. Officials in Texas are hoping the power grid can hold as they forecast today to be an all-time high for demand. We're talking widespread crop

losses, water emergencies because of supply shortages from reservoirs and streams and wells. So drought is hitting far and wide. And how long has this current drought been going on? It depends on where you're looking and how you count it, right? There was this great paper that just came out from Park Williams Lab at UCLA that looked at megadroughts in Southwest North America. Megadroughts. Megadroughts. So a megadrought is about as bad as it sounds, which is an exceptionally long-lasting severe drought worse than any we've seen in 20th century Western North America. And so this paper

looked all the way through most Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, as well as down through Southwest Mexico. Looking at average soil moisture across the Southwest region, Williams' team found that 2000 to 2021 was the driest 22-year period in the past 1,200 years. Wow. They also reported that human-caused climate change has made things worse. The Williams Lab used climate models to estimate that about 40% of the Western megadrought severity is coming from human-caused climate change, and 60% to what he said in an email is regular old bad luck, which can be shaped by a number of things, including temperatures on the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Huh. But, you know, what is clear is that climate change drives temperatures higher. The atmosphere gets thirstier. Things dry out even more. And in California, climate scientist Daniel Swain at UCLA and others have shown that we're seeing a really big shift in precipitation, including a shorter, sharper, rainier season, which we saw this year. You know, the main reason why droughts are getting worse, and this is true across much of the western U.S. and in fact a lot of places on Earth where droughts are in fact getting worse, is the rising temperatures themselves,

which increase the evaporative demand of the atmosphere, meaning that essentially it increases the propensity of the atmosphere to act as a giant sponge extracting more and more water out of the landscape. We called up Daniel Swain at UCLA to ask about this shift. So unless you're getting a lot more precipitation to counteract that, you're getting much drier hydrologic conditions, much drier vegetation. Daniel calls this precipitation whiplash. So you're getting wetter wets, but also drier dries. But in practice, that doesn't really even out.

It does not come out in the wash, as you might say. So there really is a difference between getting all of your precipitation in these increasingly short but sharp bursts and having it more evenly distributed throughout a longer period of time. You know, we got a pretty spectacular atmospheric river in October, but then from January through March, there was pretty much nothing in terms of meaningful storms. Because the more intense it is and the shorter bursts you have, the more time in between those bursts you have for evaporation, and so the drier the soil gets,

and the less of that water actually soaks into the ground because it's falling so intensely that much of it just runs off immediately into rivers, lakes, and streams. Where else does the American West get its water from other than rain? About 25 million people rely on Lake Mead, which is mostly supplied by the Colorado River and delivers water to Arizona, California, Nevada. And conditions are pretty dire there. It is the primary source of water here, and it has become the incredible shrinking river. The lake is so low that a body in a barrel and a World War II-era landing craft have risen from the water.

Right. But it begs the question, how many more bodies will be found now that the lake is at record low levels? And along with Lake Powell, these massive reservoirs are at historically low levels right now. But water supplies really vary even within states. In California, we rely on this pretty remarkable source of water in our snowpack, which is sort of a reservoir for spring and summer as the snow melts and flows into our storage. Think of the snowpack as a frozen reservoir. The state says it's responsible for about 30% of California's water, including drinking water.

We also have parts of the state that rely heavily or exclusively on groundwater, which sees some pretty serious depletion during drought when surface water supplies dry up and people start pumping more. When this much water is pumped out of the aquifer below ground, the clay between the pockets of water collapses and the ground starts to deflate like a leaky air mattress. The sinking is buckling the walls of irrigation canals, damaging pipes, creating giant sinkholes and cracking homes. When you're talking about things like Lake Powell or Lake Mead or the Colorado River, who's in charge? Who dictates who gets how much water?

Yeah, that's the million-dollar question, right? Who controls the water? And it'll vary depending on the type of water, too, whether we're talking rivers, streams, groundwater, federally managed water, state-managed water. It's a mess. So looking at the West, we've got decades, even century-old agreements and court decisions that govern the use and the management of the Colorado River. In California, we've got the state-managed state water project that pipes water from reservoirs south, federally managed Central Valley project. And then we've got, you know, rivers and streams

that are governed by this sort of arcane and incredibly complex system of water rates that go back to the gold rush, when it was essentially finders keepers when it came to water. And how are these arcane laws doing now that we're seeing the most extreme conditions we've seen in, it sounds like, over a millennium? We're seeing them really put to the test this year. Parts of California in the Sacramento Valley have really typically been immune to drought because of this Byzantine

water rights system and because of a deal they cut with the federal government, you know, decades ago. And because of that, they typically can't be cut by more than a quarter when it comes to their water supply. So even during the most dire of droughts, their water supply is pretty good. But this year, they've been cut 82% or more. And I spoke with one rancher who bought this beautiful piece of land with a view of Mount Shasta, and he bought it because it had a water supply that was virtually guaranteed because of this deal. It had never seen cuts to its water supply of more than a quarter. And this year, the first time ever, it's not getting any water. I mean, we could see even steeper curtailments of growers and cities that pump directly from rivers and streams. And already many have seen cuts,

really severe cuts this year. So it could be even worse next year, which means, you know, more crop fallowing, which means steeper conservation orders in cities and towns, earlier, deeper curtailments for those relying on river water. I mean, it's getting hotter, right? Heat waves are getting worse. The dries are getting drier. The wets are becoming more extreme. And, you know, the West as a region is iridifying. And it's this combination of human activity and climate change and also nature. I was talking to a climate scientist, Daniel Swain, at UCLA, though, and he said he doesn't like the phrase the new normal. And I'm quoting him because it suggests we've arrived at some new stable state. We have at least a few more decades of significant warming and significant increases in extreme weather events and significant changes in precipitation patterns and the occurrence of drought in different regions.

And we've seen an example of this, you know, as recently as this past week, where London saw unprecedented, record-breaking temperatures that would have been unforeseeable as recently as a couple of years ago. You know, there are fires burning structures in the city of London this week, and that's not something that we had really ever seen before. If you told me I was in Southern California with wildfires by the highway, bone-dry vegetation, and temps hitting 100 degrees, I might believe you. But this, this is London, and people are shocked. So the new normal is really a moving target depending on continued fossil fuel use. Reading about this story and having some personal experience with like a mom who loves to water her lawn in Los Angeles, I just feel like the, the biggest issue here outside of ranchers who no

longer have the water they thought they were promised, is that people moved out west and were promised a way of life that was entirely unsustainable. And that idea is just hard to wrap your head around, that my way of life is unsustainable. When you talk to the smartest people in this field, what do they say about the sort of sea change in thinking that needs to occur in a moment like this? I think one of the sources of, I don't know if I want to say hope, but, you know, sources that there are ways to conserve water, which is only one part of this equation, but is that after the last drought, I remember reporting in the spring of 2021 when this drought was really taking off, that at that point, Californians were still using about 16 percent less water than in 2013 when the last drought was getting going. So did those regulations that Governor Jerry Brown put in place the last time California had a drought, let's say, did they work?

The mandatory call for water conservation did work. So we saw that after that order, savings from June 2015 to February 2016 were about 24% compared to those same months in 2013. So California stepped up and they conserved. Some of those conservation gains stuck around too. And some of that was because of really fundamental changes to things that last, like fixtures, replacing water guzzling toilets, changing to landscaping and irrigation that was motivated and funded by mandates and incentives

during the last drought. And so it does show that California's water use can change. You know, did it change enough? Probably not, but it did change. And talking to folks, you know, they point to recycled water projects. They talk about building gray water and water reuse into planning. So it does seem like there are ways to improve California's water situation. It may take, you know, really kind of reimagining what California looks like beyond the kind of endless stretches of turf, but it's possible to see that change. Rachel Becker, she's a reporter with CalMatters. You also heard from UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain,

Go Bruins, and Kaylee Wells from KCRW. Our show today was produced by Abishai Artsy. He had help from Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, and Paul Mounsey. It's Today Explained. Stay cool.