With Elections, ILWU Local 13 Hopes to Get Its House in Order p. 3 Arts, Culture and Entertainment:
MOLAA Launches Frida Kahlo Photo Exhibition p.15 The Azar Lawrence Quintet Turns Out the Seabird Lounge p.16
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
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The Local Publication You Actually Read
n Jan.17, California Gov. Jerry Brown declared the state officially in drought. “We can’t make it rain, but we can be much better prepared for the terrible consequences that California’s drought now threatens,” he said. Days later, in his State of the State address, he said, “We can take this drought as a stark warning of things to come.” And for good reason. As Random Lengths explained in 2007, in the wake of a ferocious wildfire season, the question is not whether droughts (and thereby wildfires) are caused by global warming—the relationship between climate and weather is always more complicated and multi-causal than that. Rather, extreme drought and the effects it brings, are windows into the sort of future that global warming is inexorably bringing us. And, even though we finally got some immediate relief as February turned to March, the long-term prospects remain dire, not just for California, but for most of the continent as well. As documented in a 2010 paper, “Drought under global warming” by Dr. Aiguo Dai, of the State University of New York, Albany, combined rainfall projections from dozens of models portray a future dramatically drier for the entire continental United States, as well as many other major regions of the world. Although almost the entire United States was dramatically drier from 2000 to 2009 than it had been from 1950 to 1959, the driest part of the Southwest in this past decade will actually be more moist than most of the continental United States by the 2060 to 2069 decade. “The West U.S., in particular the Southwest U.S., has reversed the course since around year 2000 towards a much drier climate for the foreseeable future,” Dai told Random Lengths in midFebruary, when this article was first being researched. Dai cited two influences—the long-term trend of global warming driving temperatures higher, and the short-term cycling of el Niño/la Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific. “Even if the Pacific Ocean condition reverses its course after a few decades, the West U.S. is unlikely to return to its relatively wet conditions experienced in the 1980s and 1990s because of the large drying associated with the projected warming,” he said. Random Lengths also spoke with UCLA geographer Glen MacDonald, who coined the term “perfect drought” to describe droughts affecting all three of Southern California’s water sources—the Colorado River, the Sacramento River and local rainfall or groundwater. “Two-thousand-thirteen was a record dry year,” said MacDonald, when first interviewed in mid-February. “But it’s not surprising if we only have 100 or 150 years of records—if it came in isolation.... It is trouble in a century where the entire first
By Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor
Climate Action Rally/ to p. 7
March 7 - 20, 2014
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either rain nor thunder kept the hundreds of environmental justice advocates and activists calling for action on climate change from amassing at Wilmington’s Waterfront Park on March 1. If anything, it presages the deluge of activists that will descend on Washington, D.C. on Nov. 1 to call for immediate action to drastically curb greenhouses gasses that have led to dramatic climate change. By then, demonstrators across the country will have marched
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On the Cusp of Megadraught/ to p. 6