Hot droughts in the West are intensifying: paper

Is Earth fucked? 

Evidence that we humans have eaten or burned ourselves out of habitats creating catastrophes behind us is strewn throughout the North American continent. European settlement and the Industrial Revolution in the New World took hardwoods for charcoal then humans allowed fast-growing conifers to replace lost forests. Desertification driven by agricultural practices, overgrazing, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and urban sprawl have turned much of the United States into scorched earth. 

The Anthropocene is now. 

The Mesa Verdean ancients who occupied the Green Table for nearly a millennium grew to a population of about five thousand creating spectacular architecture and art-of-fact but ultimately consumed every living thing atop Chapin and Wetherill Mesas. Matrilineal and matrilocal, their resulting exodus took them east over the Continental Divide (possibly not for the first time considering their hunter-gatherer past) into the Rio Grande valley and settled Santa Fe where their descendants were all but wiped out by the invading Spanish forces. Puebloans in New Mexico accept their stations as members of the Fourth World. Theirs is a cautionary tale of ecological destruction followed by extirpation: a trophic cascade where human is the apex predator and decimates a landscape. 

Rangers at Mesa Verde National Park drive home a narrative of preserving ecosystems to visitors. There are specimens of Rocky Mountain juniper that date to the time of the departure of the puebloans: about eight hundred years old. The bark was used in most of the ways northwest Indigenous cultures used (and still use) it.

Have we reached Peak Human? Should Liberals and Progressives just say: "to Hell with biodiversity" and join the Earth haters in a final orgy of death, consumption and/or prayer? Coexist or kill them all and let Gaia sort 'em out?

We develop the Western North American Temperature Atlas (WNATA), a data-independent 0.5° gridded reconstruction of summer maximum temperatures back to the 16th century. Our evaluation of the WNATA with existing hydroclimate reconstructions reveals an increasing association between maximum temperature and drought severity in recent decades, relative to the past five centuries. The synthesis of these paleo-reconstructions indicates that the amplification of the modern WNA megadrought by increased temperatures and the frequency and spatial extent of compound hot and dry conditions in the 21st century are likely unprecedented since at least the 16th century. We find that the Great Plains region is historically most prone to experiencing anomalously warm and dry summers >2.0 σ, while the central/southern United States Rocky Mountains and much of California show the highest historical prevalence of concurrent warm summer temperatures and low winter precipitation. Once more, the spatial footprint of severe hot drought over the past two decades far exceeds that of any other period since at least the middle of the 16th century. [Increasing prevalence of hot drought across western North America since the 16th century]

ip image.

Since 1970, spring temperatures have increased by 2°F on average across the contiguous U.S. https://t.co/m12i7fS62q #climatematters pic.twitter.com/rFrqbQTSWO

— Climate Central (@ClimateCentral) February 28, 2024