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Hurricanes announce themselves on forecasters' radar screens before slamming into an unlucky coast — all on live television. Tornadoes strike with little warning, but no one can doubt what's going on the moment a black funnel cloud touches down. If we're lucky, a tsunami offers a brief tip-off — the unnatural sight of the ocean retreating from the beach — before it cuts a swath of destruction and death.

But a drought is different. It begins with a few dry weeks strung end to end, cloudless skies and hot weather. Lawns brown as if toasted, and river and lake levels drop like puddles evaporating after the rain. Farmers worry over wilting crops as soil turns to useless dust. But for most of us, life goes on normally, the dry days in the background — until the moment we wake up and realize we're living through a natural catastrophe. Weather experts like to call drought the "creeping disaster." Though it destroys no property and yields no direct death toll, drought can cost billions of dollars, its effects lasting for months and even years. The writer Alex Prud'homme — author of a great new book on water called The Ripple Effect — compares drought to a "python, which slowly and inexorably squeezes its prey to death."

This summer, the python has gripped much of the South, from the burned fringes of Arizona — singed by record-breaking wildfires — to usually swampy Georgia. Ground zero is Texas, which is suffering through the worst one-year drought on record, with the state receiving just 6 in. (15 cm) of rain since January. At the end of July, a record 12% of the continental U.S. was in a state of "exceptional drought" — the most severe ranking given by the National Drought Mitigation Center. More than 2 million acres (800,000 hectares) of farmland in Texas have been abandoned, streets are cracking as trees desperately draw the remaining moisture from the ground, and ranchers whose pasturelands have gone dry are selling off cattle by the thousands. "This historic drought has depleted water resources, leaving our state's farmers and ranches in a state of dire need," said Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples last week. "The damage to our economy is already measured in billions of dollars and continues to mount."

The South has suffered crippling droughts in the past, from the long dry stretch in 2007 that almost led to water wars among Georgia, Florida and Alabama to the multiyear Texas drought of the 1950s, which helped reshape the state's mostly agricultural economy. But this time could be different — and worse. The driest regions are also the ones that have grown fastest in recent years — Texas added more than 4.2 million residents from 2000 to 2010, expanding more quickly than any other state in the U.S., with Arizona and Georgia close behind. That means millions more Americans are living in rapidly growing cities like San Antonio, Austin and Phoenix that can be dry even in the wettest years. More at http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2087504,00.html

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Originally posted by Niki2:


Jezus, 106-108º == I can't even conceive. Yes, in Afghanistan we got Summer temps up to 125º, and we weren't acclimated to it like the Afghans, but our houses had all marble floors and other methods of keeping the heat out, and we just stayed indoors! Plus it was desert heat, no humidity at all.

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Originally posted by RionaEire:
Raptor, yeah, it does happen, but you feel much differently about it when your livelihood is dwindling away before your eyes and you can't stop it. And when old people are dying in the next town over because they don't have air conditioning, but you didn't know them so you couldn't invite them over to visit your house.
Its easy to not really think about stuff when it isn't happening to you.

Anyone who thinks weather isn't a real world event isn't living in the real world.

I hope you get that hurricane Quicko, I hope its just the right size to break the dry spell but not bad enough to kill anyone.

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