Climate Change, Groundwater Depletion, and the Emerging Water Crisis
Türkiye is rapidly approaching a critical threshold at which it could officially become a water-poor nation by 2030, driven heavily by severe climate change and extensive groundwater mismanagement.
Located within the highly vulnerable Mediterranean Basin, Türkiye is experiencing plunging per-capita water availability, escalating drought, and an alarming 88 percent risk of nationwide desertification. The consequences extend far beyond water supplies. According to a climate assessment by the World Bank, a mere 10 percent reduction in water supply could cost the country 6 percent of its total GDP.
The emerging crisis illustrates how climate energy can propagate through an interconnected system: rising temperatures intensify drought; drought reduces surface water and reservoir replenishment; declining water supplies increase groundwater extraction; falling water tables destabilize the landscape; and the resulting agricultural, urban, and economic stresses compound one another.
Drivers of Water Poverty
Plunging Per-Capita Water Supply
The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification warns that population growth combined with rising temperatures will push Türkiye into official water poverty within years.
As the population grows while available water supplies decline, the amount of water available per person continues to fall. Climate change compounds the problem by increasing evaporation, intensifying drought, and placing additional pressure on already limited freshwater resources.
Vanishing Natural Lakes
Environmental experts report that more than 75 percent of Türkiye’s lakes have completely dried up over the past 60 years.
The disappearance of natural lakes represents more than the loss of individual bodies of water. Lakes function as components of larger regional hydrological systems, storing water and supporting agriculture, ecosystems, and communities. Their disappearance is another visible indicator of a system under increasing water stress.
Diminishing Rainfall
Recurrent droughts occur every few years, causing critical declines in surface runoff and reservoir replenishment.
As precipitation becomes less reliable and temperatures rise, the same amount of rainfall can produce less usable water. Higher evaporation rates remove more moisture from soils, reservoirs, and landscapes, while shortened snowmelt cycles further alter the timing and volume of downstream water.
The Agriculture and Sinkhole Crisis
Groundwater Over-Extraction
As drought intensifies, farmers have increasingly turned to groundwater to sustain crops. An estimated 120,000 unlicensed wells have been dug to compensate for declining surface-water availability.
Groundwater therefore becomes a critical emergency reserve—but continued extraction faster than natural recharge transforms that reserve into a rapidly depleting resource.
Receding Water Tables
Heavy agricultural siphoning is causing underground water tables in central regions to decline by up to 16 feet annually.
This represents a profound alteration of the subsurface water system. As groundwater is removed faster than it can be replenished, the water table retreats deeper beneath the agricultural landscape.
Proliferating Sinkholes
The structural consequences are increasingly visible.
This underground depletion has contributed to the formation and collapse of more than 680 massive sinkholes across the crucial Konya Basin agricultural region.
The sinkholes provide a dramatic physical manifestation of the water crisis: what is being removed from beneath the landscape eventually manifests at the surface.
Urban and Geopolitical Strains
Stressed Mega-Cities
Major urban centers—including Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir—face severe water scarcity as major reservoirs regularly fall below critical capacity.
The crisis is therefore not confined to rural agricultural regions. As water supplies tighten, cities must compete with agriculture, industry, ecosystems, and other demands for an increasingly constrained resource.
Downstream River Depletion
Shorter mountain snowmelt cycles are heavily reducing the natural volumes flowing into regional rivers.
Changes in snowpack and melt timing can disrupt the seasonal delivery of freshwater downstream, further stressing rivers, reservoirs, agriculture, and communities dependent upon predictable water flows.
Geopolitical Tensions
The water crisis also extends beyond Türkiye’s borders.
Restricted flows from dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers worsen severe water crises downstream in Syria and Iraq, according to The Water Project.
Water scarcity can therefore become a regional geopolitical problem, transforming climate-driven hydrological changes into competition among nations sharing increasingly stressed river systems.
The Climate-Energy Connection
Türkiye’s emerging water crisis demonstrates how climate energy does not remain confined to a thermometer reading.
Climate change increases the energy available to the atmosphere and intensifies the hydrological cycle. The resulting extremes can simultaneously increase evaporation, alter precipitation, accelerate snowmelt, reduce water availability, and increase demand for irrigation.
When human water consumption is added to those climate stresses, the system can move rapidly toward a critical threshold.
Water poor. No water pour.
For Türkiye, the question is no longer simply whether climate change will affect water availability. The emerging question is how quickly multiple water-related stresses can begin comingling and amplifying one another—and what happens when a nation’s agricultural, urban, economic, and geopolitical systems all depend upon the same shrinking resource.
Tonight’s homework assignment: How much land do I need for my own shit? (AKA The Eat n’ Poop Experiment)
Both literally and figuratively.
This is an experiment I’ve been working on for years. And when you actually try to do it—when you have to think about where your food comes from, where your water comes from, and what happens to everything that comes out of you—you gain a very different perspective.
And yes, sometimes the experiment even comes down to a question like: Do I eat the worm, or don’t I?
Food and water are big problems.
But getting rid of what comes out of you can be an even bigger problem.
I’ve been meeting quite a few other people who are “doing it”—trying to become more self-sufficient, reduce their dependence on centralized systems, and figure out what is actually required to sustain a human being.
So I thought a good test for me would be to reevaluate the whole concept at two scales:
Macro. And micro.
Tonight is micro night.
How many acres do you need for your own shit?
A commonly cited homesteading rule of thumb is roughly 2–5 acres per person for a fairly self-sufficient setup—but that’s not a universal number. It depends enormously on your diet, soil, climate, water supply, livestock, energy needs, and how much of your waste you can safely recycle.
And that’s where it gets interesting.
Food production: You might be able to produce a substantial amount of plant food on a fraction of an acre. Add grains, livestock, dairy, or meat, and the land requirement can increase dramatically.
Water: You need a reliable source of potable water—and potentially enough watershed, recharge area, storage, or infrastructure to keep that supply reliable.
Waste: This is the part people tend to overlook.
Your sewage system doesn’t just need a place to put sewage. It needs soil, treatment capacity, separation from groundwater and drinking-water sources, and enough suitable land for the system to function safely.
In Pennsylvania, for example, wastewater land-treatment systems can require significant separation distances from private drinking-water wells. That means the geometry of the property can matter almost as much as the number of acres.
At the right scale—and with proper treatment—some things we call “waste” become inputs into another system.
So tonight I’m starting at the smallest possible unit:
One human.
How much land does one human actually need to provide food, water, and a safe place to put—or recycle—everything that comes out of them?
How many acres do you need for your own shit?
Then we’ll scale it up.
Because four people don’t necessarily require four times the land. And four people sharing a watershed, a food system, and a waste-treatment system creates an entirely different problem.
Tonight: micro. Next: macro.
MACRO
Tonight’s homework assignment: How much land do we need for all our shit?
AKA: The “Who Will Fend for Themselves?” Experiment
Last night was micro: How much land do I need for just me?
Tonight is macro: How much land do we need for me, my family, and company?
In two different experiments—one in New Zealand and one in Pennsylvania—families have been trying to find the answer.
Interestingly, both case studies arrived at a remarkably similar result: if you can optimize the use of roughly 100 acres, you can support about 20 people, although toward the lower end of what we would consider a modern standard of living.
And that’s when the bigger problem became evident.
As part of our long-term planning, we had to determine who would be allowed to come live with us in a crisis such as climate change.
There were eight of us. We figured our parents would need to be among the first to come. That added six, bringing us to 14. Then we started adding siblings, their partners, and their children. We quickly exceeded 25.
So the real question became:
Who gets invited?
And who is left to fend for themselves?
That sounds like an abstract thought experiment when you have plenty of land, food, water, and energy. It becomes a very different question when those resources have a hard limit. And as climate change accelerates—and the number of grandchildren continues to grow—these questions are no longer really about “future generations.”
They are about our own descendants.
They are the people who may actually have to confront the new realities we are leaving them.
That’s the part of the experiment I find hardest to calculate.
Not how many people the land can sustain.
But who gets to be one of them.
Notes
In New Zealand, Ganantchian Claire said:
Human waste is a very easy “problem “. Composting is super easy, safe, and valuable. Water of course depends where you are. Stream, or roof water are easy gravity fed, groundwater requires energy to bring it up. Food, acreage… as you say, depends entirely on your soil and climate. My opinion is a cow or a couple of goats are the easiest quickest way to get food security as milk covers all your needs. My experience is plants are great, but unreliable as crops can be devastated in a flash by pests or weather events. To avoid starvation, I would never give up my milking cow. One could actually survive with no land at all just walking a cow along the roadsides. A bit extreme, but why not?
In Pennsylvania, USA, I replied:
Nice! Thanks. “Real food” is the hardest thing in my environment as well, especially in the winter. When I say real food, I mean exactly what you said—food security. Eating vegetation is not something I can do for any extended period, and winter makes that particularly difficult.
Though your winters get cooler, I assume they aren’t quite as extreme as Pennsylvania’s, are they?
This becomes particularly relevant when we get to the “macro” experiment.
You also raise another important point with your example of “walking a cow along the roadsides.” In our experiment, we set it up as a game. One of the rules is that you can’t use other people’s land.
That, too, depends on where you live—and on what is considered public property versus private property. Ultimately, I think this is a debate that is likely to intensify as climate migration itself intensifies.
As for waste management, this also appears to be heavily dependent upon location.
In Pennsylvania, the largest long-term problem is waste management, followed by food, then water. But if you don’t manage waste properly, water quickly becomes your biggest problem. Contamination of drinking-water supplies from inadequate or poorly located waste management has been a long-term issue.
Traditionally, you needed at least 10 acres if you could not “perc” your lot.
Collecting rainwater isn’t necessarily a viable solution either. There simply isn’t enough precipitation in many locations across the continental U.S. And in several states, there are legal restrictions on collecting or impeding the flow of water unless you specifically own the water rights.
That’s what makes this experiment so interesting.
The answer isn’t just “How much land do I need?”
It’s where is the land, what can it produce, where does the water come from, and where does the poo go?
How many acres do you have available and how many people do you think you could sustain?
Ganantchian replied:
Interesting conversation. It highlights one of the biggest obstacles to self sufficiency is regulations.
We have 100 acres of land. 25 acres retired to native bush and wetlands, 50 acres very steep of very poor quality soil, 25 acres of which have been planted in poplars. And 25 acres of gently slopping with average quality soil.
I reckon we would comfortably feed 20 people in a localised system ie no fossil fuels or synthetic fertilisers use. Because of the poor inherent quality of our soil, manure from animals and us is the most valuable resource. If composted properly, it is safe to use around fruit and nut trees, which we have planted over 100 over the farm.
Our climate is very mild and with usually good rainfall although we do get drought. Rainwater is vital for drinking as I drunk water from our creek as an experiment and got quite sick Although it’s fine when boiled.
But again, the biggest hurdle is having to pay land rates. Which at the moment the livery horses cover. They do take up 90% of our grazing land… so currently the farm can only sustain 1 or 2 people… All because we are forced to fund Growth in the region, new roads, infrastructure for cars which I loathe, airport extensions which I vowed to never use again…
Hence it is very difficult to prepare for the unfolding multi crisis while the authorities are impeding our progress.
I responded:
Yes, very interesting indeed. Our macro experiment was intended to demonstrate how many people we could sustain on similar acreage. The result was almost identical.
Two families of four acquired 135 acres. About 35 acres were “public rights of way,” and another 20 acres were steep slopes and other unlivable acreage. Some of those 35 acres consisted of three streams, so potable water wasn’t a problem. One of the streams originated from a spring on the property and tested safe for drinking.
We had a cattle and chicken farmer adjoining the property. We exchanged our tillable acreage, about 65 acres, for him to grow feedstock in exchange for him raising a couple of cows and some chickens for us. There were also fish, small game, deer, and other protein sources. That left us about 15 acres for vegetables.
We did not fully develop and complete the land-management plan because it was not economical at the time. However, we did a thorough plan for being able to survive the winters. Solar panels offered the best and cheapest energy source. Small hydroelectric systems installed in the streams could add additional wattage. In addition, a small windmill could pump water up the steep slope to a small reservoir, which could be used as a “battery” for hydropower when the sun wasn’t shining.
Sewage ended up being the limiting factor.
Without sewage, we could sustain about 38 people. With sewage, that number dropped to about 25. The three streams were great for eating and drinking, but they limited where we could build sewage treatment systems without having rainwater runoff contaminate the drinking water and food sources.
The end result was a self-sustaining property of roughly 100 acres that could provide enough food, water, and energy for 20–25 people.
That is when the bigger problem became evident.
As part of our long-term plan, we had to determine who would be allowed to come live with us in a crisis such as climate change. There were eight of us. We thought our parents would need to be the first to be saved. That was an additional six, bringing the total to 14. If all of our siblings, their mates, and kids were included, we quickly exceeded 25.
So that became the bigger issue.
Who would be on the list of people invited versus the list of people to fend for themselves?
As climate change accelerates and the number of grandchildren grows, these questions are no longer about future generations. They are about our own descendants being forced to confront the new realities they will inherit.
She asked:
did you give up?
Yes, I equally feel that I only can provide for close loved ones. It might become different if our local community wakes up. But so far, most of my neighbors think the crisis is a distant worry for the next generation. I’m more than happy to open my gardens to as many people as possible. As long as they are on the same page, and putting in the hard yards.
People seem to think we have time. But the systems you are describing take years to put into place. 50 years ago is when humanity should have gone down that track.
Now… we barely have time to prepare for our small family groups…
Makes me ponder if I’ve done it in the right place as the local population (walking distance) is about 2000 people. 99% of whom rely entirely on being fed by supermarkets and takeaways…
I replied:
No, we didn’t give up. We achieved the goals of the study.
I was the climatologist, economist, and estate planner, as well as the land-management executive. What became obvious was that the physics, science, and logic of a crisis weren’t going to be the real problem.
The security of the infrastructure from outside threats—and the internal trust required to manage the “financial trust fund”—were going to be the larger crisis within the crisis.
One would hope that a crisis would bring us—humanity—together.
Unfortunately, the opposite appears to be true.
Fear and greed are inherent problems that get amplified in a crisis.
That was probably the most important thing we learned from the experiment.
From Biodiversity to Monoculture: The Socio-Economic-Ecological Feedback Loop
Climate change is often described as a problem of rising temperatures, but temperature is only one expression of the additional energy entering the Earth system.
That energy moves through the atmosphere, hydrologic cycle, soils, vegetation, ecosystems, agriculture, forests, and human economies. As each system responds, it can alter the conditions experienced by the others.
This creates feedback loops.
A recent investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that glyphosate is being sprayed in California forests at record levels. The U.S. Forest Service, timber companies, and other land managers use glyphosate after wildfire or timber harvest to suppress competing vegetation and improve the establishment of commercially valuable conifers.
At first glance, this may appear to be a straightforward forestry practice: kill competing plants, plant trees, and accelerate forest recovery.
But viewed through the lens of climate-system dynamics, it raises a much larger question:
What happens when our response to climate disruption further simplifies the ecosystems we depend upon for resilience?
Climate Energy Is Changing the Recovery Environment
Western forests are already experiencing a combination of higher temperatures, increasing atmospheric moisture demand, changing precipitation and snowpack, declining soil moisture, drought stress, and increasingly severe wildfire.
A forest can experience increasing stress for years without an obvious transformation. Then a threshold can be crossed.
Trees die.
Seed sources disappear.
Regeneration fails.
Shrubs and grasses occupy the landscape.
The ecosystem begins transitioning from one state to another.
As the paper explains, under moderate emissions scenarios, up to 40% of western conifer forests could convert to shrubland or grassland by 2100.
That is not simply forest damage.
It is ecosystem conversion.
And once we recognize that distinction, the economics of post-fire forest management look different.
The Economics of Reforestation
After a major wildfire, rapidly growing shrubs, grasses, ferns, and deciduous vegetation can compete with planted conifer seedlings for water, nutrients, and sunlight.
From a timber-production perspective, that competition is a problem.
Glyphosate provides an efficient way to remove it.
The Forest Service has used herbicide treatments as part of regeneration efforts because suppressing competing vegetation can improve the early survival and growth of desired seedlings. Forest research acknowledges that this is one reason herbicides have been used in reforestation.
The economic objective is therefore understandable:
But that is not necessarily the same objective as:
restore biodiversity → restore ecological function → increase climate resilience.
Those two objectives can overlap.
They can also conflict.
A Forest Is Not a Tree Farm
The distinction matters because a forest is not simply a collection of trees.
A functioning forest contains an enormous biological network:
multiple tree species
shrubs
grasses
flowering plants
fungi and mycorrhizal networks
insects and pollinators
birds
mammals
reptiles and amphibians
soil organisms
decomposers
streams and wetlands
genetic diversity
Each component participates in the functioning of the ecosystem.
When glyphosate is applied to eliminate “competing” vegetation, those plants are competitors only from the perspective of the desired crop.
From the perspective of the ecosystem, they may be food, shelter, habitat, soil cover, pollinator resources, firebreaks, nutrient sources, or participants in water and carbon cycling.
This creates a fundamental difference between restoration and production.
Production asks:
How efficiently can we produce the desired commodity?
Ecological restoration asks:
How effectively can we restore the biological relationships that make the ecosystem resilient?
Biodiversity Is Infrastructure
Biodiversity is often treated as an aesthetic or conservation issue.
It is much more than that.
Biodiversity is a form of ecological infrastructure.
Different species respond differently to drought, heat, insects, disease, fire, and changing precipitation. A diverse ecosystem therefore contains multiple biological responses to disturbance.
If one species performs poorly, another may survive.
If one food source disappears, another may remain.
If one plant cannot regenerate under new climatic conditions, another may occupy the available ecological niche.
This is one reason biological diversity can provide resilience.
A simplified ecosystem has fewer alternatives.
A diverse ecosystem has more.
That distinction becomes increasingly important as climate variability increases.
From Biodiversity to Monoculture
The problem becomes more obvious when forestry is compared with modern industrial agriculture.
Large-scale agriculture often relies on monocultures: enormous areas devoted to a single crop or a very small number of genetically similar crops. Monoculture creates economic efficiencies. Machines can plant, fertilize, spray, harvest, and transport a standardized product at enormous scale. But biological simplification creates vulnerabilities.
A pest that specializes in the crop has an enormous continuous food supply. A disease can spread rapidly through genetically similar plants. Soil nutrients can become depleted. Pollinator and insect diversity can decline. Herbicide and pesticide dependence can increase.
The economic system becomes increasingly dependent upon external inputs to maintain productivity.
The result can be a feedback loop:
biodiversity declines → ecological resistance declines → pests and disease become more consequential → chemical inputs increase → biodiversity declines further.
This is not an argument that all monoculture agriculture inevitably fails.
It is an argument that efficiency and resilience are not the same thing.
The same distinction applies to forestry.
The Forest Monoculture
When post-fire management suppresses naturally regenerating vegetation in order to establish commercially desirable conifers, the landscape can move toward a forest plantation rather than a naturally regenerating forest.
A plantation can contain thousands of trees and still possess considerably less biodiversity than the ecosystem it replaced.
This creates a dangerous semantic trap. We see trees. We call it a forest. But ecological function depends upon far more than tree cover.
A plantation of one or a few commercially valuable species can look green from above while functioning very differently from a diverse forest.
And in a warming climate, that distinction can become critical.
Ecosystem Conversion Versus Reforestation
This is where the concept of ecosystem conversion becomes important.
Suppose a severe wildfire destroys a mature conifer forest.
The original ecosystem does not necessarily return.
Under the warmer and drier conditions described in my Western U.S. Woodlands paper, grasses and shrubs may become better adapted to the post-fire environment than the trees that previously occupied it.
The second pathway is not simply allowing the ecosystem to respond to its new climate. It is imposing an economic land-use objective upon that response. That distinction should be explicit in public policy.
The Carbon Question
There is another important distinction. A green landscape is not necessarily equivalent to the forest that existed before. Grasslands and shrublands photosynthesize and absorb carbon.
So do plantations.
But carbon uptake is not the same thing as carbon storage.
A mature forest contains carbon in:
trunks
branches
roots
dead wood
forest soils
long-lived biomass
The Ecosystem Conversion paper makes this distinction explicitly:
carbon uptake ≠ carbon storage capacity
and
positive carbon flux ≠ preservation of the previous carbon stock.
A plantation may therefore satisfy a narrow definition of reforestation while failing to reproduce the carbon reservoir, biodiversity, hydrology, and ecological complexity of the original forest.
The Glyphosate Feedback
This brings us back to glyphosate. The current controversy is not simply about a herbicide. It is about the interaction between climate disruption, economic incentives, land management, biodiversity, and ecosystem resilience.
The emerging feedback looks something like this:
Climate warming
↓
Heat + drought + atmospheric moisture demand
↓
More severe wildfire
↓
Loss of mature forest
↓
Economic pressure to recover timber production
↓
Herbicide use to suppress competing vegetation
↓
Reduced vegetation diversity
↓
Simplified forest structure
↓
Greater dependence on managed inputs
↓
Potentially reduced ecological resilience
↓
Greater vulnerability to future climate disturbances
This does not mean glyphosate necessarily causes every subsequent step.
The feedback is systemic.
The larger point is that a management strategy designed to optimize one component of a complex system can unintentionally weaken other components.
The Scientific Evidence Must Be Independent
There is also a legitimate question about the evidence used to evaluate glyphosate. The recent investigation found that a study heavily relied upon by the Forest Service in assessing glyphosate safety was subsequently retracted after concerns about Monsanto’s involvement in the research process.That does not establish that every use of glyphosate is unsafe. It does establish why the underlying evidence should be independently reviewed.
When government policy determines what chemicals can be sprayed across public landscapes, the scientific foundation for those decisions should be exceptionally transparent.
Public land requires public confidence. And public confidence requires independent science.
From Wildfire Recovery to a National Policy
The issue also has a national economic dimension.
On February 18, 2026, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Promoting the National Defense by Ensuring an Adequate Supply of Elemental Phosphorus and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides.”
The order invokes the Defense Production Act and directs federal action to ensure an adequate domestic supply of glyphosate-based herbicides. That places glyphosate within a much larger economic framework involving agriculture, forestry, chemical manufacturing, supply chains, and national security.
The feedback becomes:
climate disruption → increased agricultural and forestry stress → greater dependence on chemical intervention → greater economic importance of chemical production → stronger incentives to maintain chemical availability.
The system becomes self-reinforcing.
The Bigger Problem: Optimizing the Wrong Variable
Climate change forces us to rethink what we mean by efficiency. A system can be economically efficient while being ecologically fragile. A monoculture can produce enormous quantities of a commodity while containing very little biological diversity. A plantation can produce timber while failing to reproduce the ecological functions of a natural forest. A landscape can be covered in green vegetation while holding substantially less carbon than the forest it replaced. And a post-fire intervention can accelerate tree planting while simultaneously simplifying the ecosystem that must survive the next climate shock.
The central question is therefore not:
How quickly can we replace the trees we lost?
It is:
What kind of ecosystem will survive the climate that is coming?
The Resilience Test
Climate change is increasing the importance of resilience.
A resilient ecosystem does not necessarily maximize production under ideal conditions.
It maintains function when conditions become abnormal.
That means diversity matters.
Species diversity.
Genetic diversity.
Structural diversity.
Age diversity.
Habitat diversity.
Landscape diversity.
Biological diversity is effectively a portfolio of responses to uncertainty.
Industrial systems tend to reduce that diversity because standardization creates efficiency.
Climate instability does the opposite.
It increases the value of diversity.
That creates one of the central contradictions of the climate era:
The more unstable the climate becomes, the more we need ecological diversity—and the more economic pressure we may face to simplify ecosystems for efficiency.
Climate Energy Is Hitting the Whole System
This is ultimately what I mean by How Is Climate Energy Hitting You?
Climate energy does not stop with a thermometer reading or a measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide. It moves through the entire coupled human-Earth system.
Heat changes water demand.
Water stress changes forests.
Forest stress changes wildfire.
Wildfire changes ecosystems.
Ecosystem disruption changes economic decisions.
Economic decisions change land management.
Land management changes biodiversity.
Biodiversity changes resilience.
And declining resilience feeds back into the next disturbance.
The resulting system is not a collection of unrelated environmental problems. It is a coupled socio-economic-ecological feedback system in which changes in one component propagate through the others.
Wildfire becomes an economic loss.
Economic loss creates pressure for rapid recovery.
Rapid recovery creates demand for herbicides, machinery, labor, and planted timber.
Those interventions alter ecosystems.
Altered ecosystems influence water, biodiversity, soil, carbon storage, and future fire behavior.
Government policy can then reinforce the economic system that produced the intervention in the first place.
The feedback can therefore become self-reinforcing.
The challenge is to recognize when a short-term economic solution becomes a long-term ecological feedback.
That distinction becomes especially important when an ecosystem crosses a threshold. Restoring the trees may not be the same thing as restoring the forest.
And once biodiversity has been converted into monoculture, replanting the landscape does not necessarily recreate the ecosystem that was lost.
Climate change is not simply changing the weather.
It is changing the decisions we make about the world around us—and those decisions can become feedbacks that determine how resilient that world remains.
North Texas: Drought, Wildfire, Evacuation, Water Scarcity, Livestock Liquidation, Crop Failure
The Ross Fire: Climate Energy on the Ground
The Ross Fire has exploded across more than 50,000 acres of North Texas, triggering mandatory evacuations, school closures, and a major emergency response. Driven by triple-digit heat, exceptionally low humidity, strong winds, and severe drought, the fire is exhibiting extreme behavior and was only about 5% contained as of August 25.
The fire began in Palo Pinto County near Highway 180 and Ross Watson Road and has pushed rapidly northeast toward southern Jack County. Firefighters have reported flames reaching as high as 100 feet, making direct attacks extremely dangerous. Crews have therefore relied heavily on bulldozers and aerial support.
Evacuations and Community Disruption
Mandatory evacuations have been ordered for portions of southern Jack County, including areas near and east of Bartons Chapel and along County Road 2210 toward Highway 281.
An evacuation center has been established at the Twin Lakes Recreation Center on Highway 59 in Jacksboro.
The fire is also disrupting education. On August 25, Perrin CISD canceled all classes, while Jacksboro ISD delayed the beginning of the school day by two hours.
This is more than a wildfire. It is a demonstration of how climate energy moves through a coupled human-environment system: heat dries vegetation, drought removes water from the landscape, wind accelerates fire spread, and communities are forced to evacuate.
Texas Is Drying Out
The Ross Fire is occurring within a much larger regional drought emergency. Drought conditions across Texas have deteriorated rapidly, with approximately 77% of the state experiencing drought. Nearly 200 counties across Texas and Oklahoma have implemented active outdoor burn bans because of elevated fire danger.
A second significant brush fire has also been reported farther south in Hamilton County near Evant, forcing localized evacuations north of Highway 84.
The important point is that wildfire is not an isolated event. Fire is the visible expression of an increasingly dry and heat-loaded landscape.
When extreme heat, low humidity, depleted soil moisture, dry vegetation, and high winds occur simultaneously, their effects are not merely additive. They reinforce one another.
Climate Energy Is Reshaping Texas Agriculture
The same climate pressures driving wildfire are disrupting Texas agriculture and the cattle industry.
Texas agriculture is confronting a convergence of prolonged drought, historic heat, declining water availability, and increasingly volatile precipitation. Together, these stresses are changing the economics of farming and ranching.
The result is not simply a bad growing season.
It is structural disruption.
The Cattle Industry Under Pressure
Shrinking Herds
Depleted water supplies and increasingly parched rangelands have contributed to a major contraction in Texas cattle operations. The Texas cattle herd has fallen from approximately 13.1 million head to about 12 million.
The national beef-cow inventory has also fallen to its lowest level in decades.
Forced Liquidation
When stock ponds empty and forage disappears, ranchers face an increasingly difficult choice: purchase expensive supplemental feed or sell their cattle.
For operations already under financial pressure, purchasing enough hay to maintain a breeding herd may be impossible. Cattle are therefore being sent to auction and slaughter earlier than planned.
Higher prices do not restore the lost water or forage.
The economic consequences therefore continue long after the drought itself begins to ease.
Beef Supply Chains Under Stress
With fewer cattle available, livestock prices are rising sharply. The contraction in cattle inventories is also putting pressure on meat processors.
When there are not enough animals moving through the system, processing facilities can become economically unsustainable. Plant closures then reduce processing capacity and increase the vulnerability of the remaining supply chain.
Climate energy is therefore moving from the atmosphere to the pasture, from the pasture to the rancher’s balance sheet, and from the rancher’s balance sheet to the consumer’s grocery bill.
Crop Agriculture Under Extreme Heat and Drought
Texas is also confronting severe challenges to crop production.
Cotton Crop Failures
Texas is the nation’s leading cotton-producing state, but extreme heat and drought have caused widespread crop stress, crop failures, and abandoned fields.
Sustained triple-digit temperatures can interfere with flowering and reproductive development, reducing yields even when plants survive.
Heat Stress and Water Scarcity
As temperatures rise, crops lose water more rapidly through evapotranspiration.
At the same time, declining soil moisture and groundwater availability make irrigation increasingly difficult and expensive.
This creates another feedback:
Higher temperatures → greater atmospheric demand for water → faster soil drying → greater irrigation demand → declining water availability → higher agricultural costs.
The atmosphere is effectively pulling water out of the agricultural system faster.
Pests and Disease
Climate disruption is also changing the biological environment in which crops are grown.
Changes in temperature and seasonal conditions can allow pests and diseases to expand their ranges, survive through seasons in which they previously could not, or reproduce more rapidly.
Threats including cotton jassid, rice delphacid, and pasture mealybug illustrate how agricultural climate risk extends beyond drought and heat.
Farmers are increasingly confronting a moving target: the climate conditions under which today’s agricultural systems evolved are changing faster than the systems themselves can adapt.
Adaptation: Fighting Back Against Climate Energy
Texas farmers and ranchers are not simply waiting for conditions to improve. Many are experimenting with strategies designed to make agricultural systems more resilient.
Regenerative Ranching
Some ranching operations are adopting rotational and multi-paddock grazing systems designed to improve soil structure, maintain living root systems, and increase water infiltration.
Healthy soils can store substantially more water than degraded soils. Improving soil organic matter and root systems can therefore provide a buffer against drought by allowing more rainfall to infiltrate and remain available to plants.
Adaptation cannot stop the atmosphere from warming.
But it can increase the amount of climate stress an agricultural system can absorb before it fails.
Carbon Farming
Managed grasslands can also store carbon in soils while improving soil health and water retention.
Carbon farming therefore has the potential to provide multiple benefits: improved pasture productivity, greater drought resilience, healthier soils, and additional revenue through carbon markets where those markets are viable.
Statewide Disaster Planning
Texas is also attempting to improve its institutional response to increasingly complex agricultural hazards.
The Texas Department of Agriculture has established the Texas Agriculture Disaster Task Force to coordinate responses to threats including wildfire, freezes, drought, and biosecurity emergencies.
That kind of planning recognizes an increasingly important reality:
Climate disasters do not occur one at a time.
A drought can increase wildfire risk.
A wildfire can destroy forage.
Heat can intensify drought.
Drought can reduce crop yields.
Crop failures can increase food prices.
Water shortages can force livestock liquidation.
And all of these pressures can occur simultaneously.
The Bigger Picture: Climate Energy Is Cascading Through the System
The Ross Fire is therefore more than 50,000 acres of burning vegetation.
It is one visible manifestation of a larger climate-energy cascade.
Drought → depleted forage and water → cattle liquidation → smaller herds → constrained beef supplies → higher prices
These are not independent problems.
They are connected expressions of the same physical system.
Climate change adds energy to the atmosphere. That additional energy intensifies the hydrologic cycle, increases atmospheric demand for water, amplifies heat extremes, and changes the timing and intensity of precipitation.
The result is increasing volatility: longer dry periods interrupted by more intense rainfall, greater heat stress, rapidly drying landscapes, and wildfire conditions that can emerge with extraordinary speed.
How Is the Climate Energy Hitting You?
In North Texas, it is hitting as drought, wildfire, evacuation, water scarcity, livestock liquidation, crop failure, and rising agricultural costs.
The Ross Fire makes the process impossible to ignore.
The fire is burning on the landscape.
The drought is draining the landscape.
And the climate energy driving both is increasingly reaching the farm, the ranch, the grocery store, and the household.
Climate change is not merely changing the weather.
It is changing the systems that depend upon the weather.
Central England is providing a very tangible demonstration of what climate energy looks like when it moves through a real landscape.
Not as an abstract temperature anomaly. Not as a number on a graph.
As heatwaves. Drought. Wildfires. Crop losses. Water restrictions. And then sudden, intense rainfall arriving on ground that has been baked hard by weeks of exceptional heat and dryness.
This is hydroclimatic whiplash: the rapid swing between one extreme hydrological condition and another.
Five Heatwaves — and Counting
Summer 2026 has already delivered a remarkable sequence of heatwaves across the United Kingdom. By August, the country had experienced a fifth heatwave, with the latest episode producing temperatures above 38°C in parts of England. Fire chiefs described the conditions as a sustained and escalating wildfire risk.
The Met Office has indicated that 2026 is on course to become the UK’s hottest summer on record, with the outlook particularly strong for England and Wales.
This isn’t simply five isolated hot spells.
Repeated heatwaves mean the landscape has less opportunity to recover between events. Soil moisture is depleted. Vegetation dries out. Rivers and reservoirs fall. Crops reach critical developmental stages under heat stress. Livestock experience thermal stress. And every subsequent heatwave starts from a more vulnerable baseline.
The energy isn’t disappearing when the thermometer comes back down.
It has already been transferred into the land, atmosphere, vegetation, water system and human infrastructure.
Drought: The Landscape Runs Out of Water
On July 29, the UK government officially declared drought across seven areas of England, including large portions of central, eastern and southern England. The government described much of the region as experiencing “flash drought,” driven by exceptionally low rainfall combined with high temperatures. Rivers were running low, farmers were harvesting early, wildfire risk was increasing and millions of people were facing water restrictions.
The situation continued to deteriorate.
By August, more than two-thirds of England had entered drought conditions. Reservoir storage had fallen to 69% and was declining, while more than 27 million people were living under water restrictions.
Official data for August 7–13 showed England receiving only 6% of its long-term average rainfall for the month to that point. Reservoir storage had fallen to 65.9%, 13.8 percentage points below the long-term average, while five reservoirs were classified as exceptionally low.
That is what a drought looks like when climate energy works through the water cycle.
The problem isn’t merely that it hasn’t rained.
It is that extraordinary heat increases evaporation and atmospheric demand for moisture while rainfall fails to replenish the system.
Then Comes the Deluge
And this is where the story gets particularly interesting.
After weeks of heat and dryness, rainfall doesn’t necessarily mean the drought is over.
When soils become severely dried and hardened, intense rainfall can run across the surface rather than infiltrating efficiently. Heavy showers and thunderstorms can therefore produce flash flooding even while the broader region remains in drought.
That apparent contradiction is becoming increasingly important.
England can simultaneously experience:
Drought underground.
Flooding on the surface.
Low reservoirs.
Overflowing drains.
Dry vegetation.
Rapid runoff.
This is hydroclimatic whiplash.
Recent forecasts and observations have already raised concerns that heavy rainfall following the prolonged drought could generate surface-water flooding without providing enough sustained precipitation to restore depleted soil moisture, groundwater and reservoirs.
A few hours of intense rain is not equivalent to weeks or months of accumulated rainfall.
The water has to be absorbed, stored and retained.
If it arrives too quickly, much of it simply moves downstream.
Wildfire: When the Landscape Becomes Fuel
The drought has also transformed the wildfire environment.
By August 10, firefighters in England and Wales had already responded to 966 wildfires in 2026, including 185 during the first ten days of August alone. July was the busiest month on record for wildfire incidents.
By August 16, the number had reached 1,132 wildfires across the UK—already exceeding the entire 2025 total, with months of the fire season still remaining.
The government eventually issued a national emergency alert warning of a very high wildfire risk across England and Wales.
And this was no longer simply a countryside problem.
In Stourbridge in the West Midlands, a grass fire spread rapidly into residential areas. Nineteen homes were destroyed and another 18 were damaged. Nearly 40 properties were affected.
The lesson is brutally simple:
When the countryside becomes tinder-dry, the boundary between wildfire and urban fire can disappear remarkably quickly.
Agriculture Takes the Hit
Perhaps the most consequential impact will not be visible in the flames.
It will be visible in the harvest.
The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit’s August analysis found that the 2026 UK arable harvest was on track to become the worst on record. Initial yield estimates were already below the 10-year average for wheat, spring barley and oats.
Then the forecast deteriorated further.
Updated figures released August 14 put UK arable production at just 18.5 million tonnes, below the previous estimate of 19.5 million tonnes and approximately 1.35 million tonnes below the previous record-low harvest in 2020. ECIU estimated that the 2026 harvest could therefore become the smallest on record.
This is what happens when climate energy arrives at the wrong time.
Heat during crop development.
Drought during critical growth periods.
Accelerated maturation.
Reduced soil moisture.
Poor grass growth.
Heat-stressed livestock.
And then, potentially, heavy rainfall arriving after crops have already suffered.
The damage is not necessarily one spectacular event.
It is the accumulation of energy transfers occurring faster than agricultural systems can adapt.
The Climate Energy Doesn’t Disappear
This is the part of the story I think we frequently miss.
When the heatwave ends, we tend to assume the problem has ended.
It hasn’t.
The energy has moved.
Heat increases evaporation.
Evaporation removes water from soils and vegetation.
Dry vegetation becomes fuel.
Drought lowers river flows and reservoirs.
Wildfires transfer enormous amounts of energy into the atmosphere and destroy ecosystems and property.
Then storms can transfer atmospheric moisture into intense rainfall.
That rainfall can become runoff and flooding rather than useful groundwater recharge.
The system keeps moving.
One extreme can help create the conditions for the next.
Central England is not experiencing one climate problem.
It is experiencing a cascade.
Five heatwaves.
Official drought.
Record-low rainfall.
Depleted water resources.
Extreme wildfire conditions.
Homes destroyed.
Agricultural losses.
And now the possibility of intense rainfall and flash flooding arriving before the underlying drought has been repaired.
That is the important distinction.
Climate change isn’t simply about making today’s weather “hotter.”
It is about changing the amount of energy available to the climate system and altering how quickly that energy can move between the atmosphere, land, water and living systems.
The result can be greater volatility.
Longer extremes.
More rapid transitions.
And increasingly destructive combinations of events.
Central England is showing us what that looks like.
The question isn’t whether the climate energy is hitting us.
It is.
The question is:
Where does it go next?
And what happens when the next transfer arrives before the system has recovered from the last one?
Sea-level rise is not simply a matter of the ocean getting higher. Climate change is altering the physical forces that move water toward and onto the shoreline. Rising seas, changing atmospheric pressure, stronger winds, altered ocean circulation, storm surge, king tides, and saltwater intrusion can interact to turn gradual sea-level rise into a much more immediate coastal threat.
A Real-World Warning: The Wetlands Institute
The experience of The Wetlands Institute in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, provides a striking example of how quickly coastal conditions can change.
The institute’s Salt Marsh Trail reportedly flooded only a few times a year around 2000. Over the past five years, flooding has averaged nearly 70 times annually. The institute is closing its headquarters on September 7, 2026, to begin a major coastal-resilience transformation.
The response includes raising the Salt Marsh Trail by two to three feet using clean dredged material, temporarily relocating operations and educational programs, and pursuing a broader campaign to replace and elevate the existing campus buildings.
This is more than an inconvenience. Increasingly frequent inundation can fundamentally alter the coastal ecosystem itself.
The Climate Shift
Accelerated sea-level rise: Sea levels along parts of the New Jersey coast are rising faster than the global average.
Marsh degradation: Repeated inundation can overwhelm salt-marsh vegetation, converting productive marsh into mudflats and eventually open water.
Wildlife disruption: More frequent flooding threatens habitats used by marsh-dependent birds and can interfere with diamondback terrapin nesting.
Infrastructure exposure: Roads, buildings, trails, drainage systems, and utilities face increasingly frequent flooding even without a major storm.
The critical point is that the climate signal is not experienced as a smooth, uniform rise in water level. It is experienced as more frequent encounters with water.
1. The Inverse Barometer Effect: Atmospheric Pressure Pushes the Ocean
Atmospheric pressure exerts physical force on the ocean surface. When a deep low-pressure system moves over the coast, the reduced atmospheric weight allows the ocean surface to rise.
The approximate relationship is:
A 1-hectopascal (hPa) decrease in atmospheric pressure produces roughly a 1-centimeter rise in sea level.
A very deep storm can therefore raise the local ocean surface substantially before the effects of wind-driven storm surge are even considered.
This is known as the inverse barometer effect.
Climate change does not simply “raise the sea.” It can alter the atmospheric conditions that determine how that elevated ocean is distributed along the coastline at any particular moment.
Inverse Barometer Effect Examples
Storm type
Approx. pressure near coast
Pressure drop from 1013 hPa
Inverse-barometer rise
Ordinary coastal storm
990–1000 hPa
13–23 hPa
5–9 in
Strong nor’easter
970–985 hPa
28–43 hPa
11–17 in
Very strong coastal storm
950–965 hPa
48–63 hPa
19–25 in
Sandy-type extreme
~945 hPa
~68 hPa
~27 in / 2.2 ft
Exceptional low-pressure event
930–940 hPa
73–83 hPa
29–33 in / 2.4–2.8 ft
The Combined Impact
The inverse barometer effect combines with wind stress, coastline shape, bathymetry, wave setup, tides, and storm track can produce much larger water-level changes. Hurricane Sandy’s actual coastal water levels were dramatically higher because the pressure effect was combined with enormous wind-driven surge, wave action, tide, and the storm’s exceptionally favorable track. At Sandy Hook, water reached about 8.9 feet above ground level, while the storm produced major surge throughout the central and northern Jersey Shore.
An additional 5 inches to 3 feet of sea-level rise represents a new baseline of climate energy impacting coastal communities. The inverse barometer effect then combines with wind stress, coastline shape, bathymetry, wave setup, tides, and storm track to produce much larger water-level changes. The result can be extreme coastal flooding, with observed water levels reaching roughly 9 feet above ground level along parts of the Jersey Shore and as much as 30 feet in parts of Florida during major storms.
2. Wind and Wave Energy: Turning Pressure Gradients Into Coastal Damage
Atmospheric pressure gradients—the differences between areas of high and low pressure—drive winds.
When those gradients become stronger, winds can become stronger and more persistent. Strong winds transfer energy to the ocean, generating larger waves and increasing wind setup, the piling of water against the coast.
The consequences can include:
Higher water levels along exposed shorelines
Larger and more destructive waves
Increased dune erosion
Offshore transport of beach sand
Overtopping of coastal defenses
Greater storm-surge penetration
The shoreline therefore experiences not only a higher baseline sea level but also increasingly energetic ways of moving that water around.
3. Altered Ocean Circulation: When Water Piles Up
Changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation can alter ocean currents and regional sea levels.
The relationship between the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic circulation, winds, and coastal sea level is particularly important along the U.S. East Coast. Changes in ocean circulation can redistribute enormous volumes of water, producing dynamic sea-level changes that may differ substantially from the global average.
In simplified terms, when ocean circulation changes, water can accumulate against a coastline rather than being transported away from it.
That means a community can experience a rapid increase in local relative sea level even when the global mean is changing much more slowly.
4. Compound Coastal Flooding: When Everything Arrives Together
The most dangerous coastal flooding occurs when multiple processes reinforce one another.
Imagine a high tide occurring while:
Global sea level is already elevated.
A low-pressure storm raises the ocean through the inverse barometer effect.
Strong onshore winds push additional water toward land.
Large waves increase water levels and erode dunes.
Heavy rainfall overwhelms drainage systems.
Rivers are already elevated and cannot discharge efficiently.
These processes can combine into compound flooding.
The problem is not simply that the water is higher. The problem is that multiple pathways for moving water onto the land are operating simultaneously.
Salt marshes normally provide a natural buffer. But repeated inundation and erosion can eventually overwhelm the marsh itself. Once protective wetlands deteriorate, more wave energy reaches infrastructure, creating a feedback loop of increasing exposure and increasing damage.
Saltwater Intrusion: When the Ocean Moves Underground
Sea-level rise has another consequence that is much less visible than coastal flooding: saltwater intrusion.
Saltwater intrusion occurs when seawater moves into freshwater systems, including groundwater aquifers, rivers, wetlands, agricultural soils, and drinking-water supplies.
Two forces are especially important:
Rising sea level increases the hydraulic pressure and inland reach of seawater.
Drought and reduced groundwater recharge weaken the freshwater pressure pushing outward toward the sea.
Together, these forces can shift the boundary between freshwater and saltwater inland.
Research has projected that saltwater contamination could affect a very large proportion of coastal aquifers by 2100, although the extent varies substantially by geography, aquifer characteristics, groundwater use, and future climate conditions.
How the Saltwater Wedge Moves Inland
Under normal conditions, rainfall replenishes groundwater. Freshwater flows toward the coast and maintains a hydraulic gradient that helps resist seawater intrusion.
Because freshwater is less dense than seawater, a freshwater lens can exist above denser saltwater beneath coastal areas.
But the balance can shift.
1. Underground Aquifer Intrusion
As sea level rises, the hydraulic pressure exerted by seawater increases. At the same time, climate-driven drought and higher temperatures can reduce groundwater recharge in some regions.
Less freshwater flowing toward the ocean means less outward pressure resisting seawater.
The underground saltwater boundary can therefore migrate inland.
This process can occur largely out of sight until a well begins producing water with elevated salinity.
2. Surface and Vertical Infiltration
Storm surge, king tides, and coastal flooding can push seawater onto land.
If that water remains on the surface, it can infiltrate downward through soils and shallow geological formations, contaminating groundwater.
Repeated flooding is especially important because a single event may be temporary, while dozens of inundation events each year can progressively alter soil and groundwater chemistry.
3. The “Highway Effect”
Human modifications to coastal landscapes can provide pathways for seawater to travel inland.
Agricultural drainage ditches, shipping channels, tidal creeks, canals, and other engineered waterways can connect coastal waters with areas that were historically protected by natural terrain.
When sea level rises or storm surge moves inland, these channels can function as highways for saltwater.
The Ecological and Economic Consequences
Saltwater intrusion does not stop at the shoreline.
Ghost Forests
As saltwater enters coastal soils and groundwater, freshwater-dependent trees can die from prolonged salt stress. The result can be stands of dead trees known as ghost forests.
These landscapes provide visible evidence that the boundary between marine and terrestrial ecosystems is moving inland.
Agricultural Damage
Salt deposited on agricultural land can accumulate in the root zone.
Excessive soil salinity interferes with plants’ ability to absorb water and can reduce crop productivity. Persistent salinization can make valuable coastal farmland increasingly difficult—or eventually impossible—to farm without expensive remediation and freshwater management.
Infrastructure Corrosion
Saltwater and brackish groundwater are highly corrosive.
Repeated exposure can accelerate deterioration of underground pipes, electrical infrastructure, concrete, foundations, roads, and other infrastructure.
The damage can occur beneath the surface long before it becomes visually obvious.
Drinking-Water Threats
Coastal communities that depend on groundwater face a particularly serious vulnerability.
Pumping already lowers groundwater levels around wells. If the freshwater table is lowered too far, the hydraulic gradient resisting seawater intrusion weakens further.
This can create another feedback:
More pumping → lower freshwater pressure → greater saltwater intrusion → less usable freshwater.
The Larger Picture: Climate Energy Does Not Disappear
Sea-level rise is one expression of a much larger physical process.
The additional energy accumulating in the climate system does not simply produce a higher average temperature. Energy moves through the atmosphere, ocean, land, ice, and biosphere.
The critical distinction is between average conditions and actual events.
A few inches of average sea-level rise may sound modest. But those inches can determine whether a high tide remains below a road or flows across it. They can determine whether a storm surge is absorbed by a functioning marsh or reaches buildings and infrastructure.
The climate system does not deliver its additional energy evenly.
It delivers it through water, wind, waves, heat, storms, erosion, flooding, and ecological disruption.
And along the coast, the ocean is increasingly finding more ways to come ashore—and stay there.
On August 21, 2026, President Donald Trump announced a temporary 90-day waiver of out-of-quota tariffs on imported ground beef, allowing up to 300,000 metric tons to enter the U.S. market tariff-free in an effort to reduce grocery prices. The president said he had secured a commitment that the imported meat would be sold at 25% below current market prices, providing relief from persistent food inflation.
The move is intended to address a dramatic increase in the cost of ground beef, which has risen roughly 57% over the past five years. But the policy immediately drew backlash from domestic cattle ranchers and rural-state Republicans, including Senator Tim Sheehy, who warned that flooding the market with cheaper foreign beef could undermine American cattle producers.
There is another problem that may be even more important to consumers: much of the imported beef affected by the policy is frozen beef destined for commercial and restaurant use, rather than the fresh ground beef consumers typically purchase at the grocery store. That means the immediate impact on household grocery bills may be considerably smaller than the headline numbers suggest.
More importantly, the tariff waiver does little to address the underlying forces driving higher beef prices.
Climate Change Is Becoming an Inflation Problem
The cattle industry is increasingly exposed to the economic consequences of climate extremes. Drought, extreme heat, wildfires, water scarcity, degraded pasture, and volatile feed supplies all increase the cost of raising cattle. When these pressures become severe enough, ranchers may be forced to reduce their herds, further constraining beef supplies and pushing prices higher.
This creates a feedback loop. Climate extremes increase production costs and reduce the supply of cattle. Reduced supply raises beef prices. Higher prices then encourage producers to rebuild their herds, but rebuilding takes years. Another drought or extreme-weather event during that process can once again force herd reductions.
This is why simply importing cheaper beef may treat the symptom without addressing the disease.
The larger economic issue is what I call climate inflation: the gradual—and increasingly rapid—incorporation of climate-related costs into the prices of food, energy, insurance, housing, transportation, and other necessities.
For the past several years, inflation discussions have focused primarily on monetary policy, supply chains, labor costs, tariffs, and government spending. Those factors certainly matter. But climate-driven disruptions are becoming an increasingly important component of the cost structure of the economy.
And unlike a temporary tariff or a change in interest rates, climate pressures can compound over time.
The Beef Problem Is Bigger Than Beef
A 90-day tariff waiver may provide some temporary relief. It may even benefit restaurants and commercial food purchasers if imported frozen beef reaches the market at substantially lower prices.
But it does not create more water, restore drought-stricken grazing land, prevent wildfires, reduce extreme heat, or rebuild cattle herds that have been lost to climate-driven conditions.
Nor does it address the increasingly expensive insurance, infrastructure, agricultural, and supply-chain consequences of a changing climate.
If climate extremes continue to intensify, we should expect more of these conflicts. Policymakers will repeatedly face the same choice: temporarily suppress prices by opening markets to cheaper imports, or address the underlying conditions that are making domestic production increasingly expensive.
Where’s the beef?
It may increasingly be somewhere else.
And that is the larger warning. Climate change is no longer simply an environmental issue. It is becoming an economic variable—and climate inflation may prove to be one of the most consequential economic developments of the next decade.
While Sidd was in town, I took some notes. Somehow, they turned into this:
Climate Change: The Big Picture
There are many ways to look at climate change. From a micro perspective, there are millions of individual feedbacks operating throughout the Earth system. From a macro perspective, there is the climate system as a whole.
Understanding how those feedbacks interact—and, more importantly, how they feed back into one another—is at the bleeding edge of climate science.
One of the simplest examples is the albedo effect. The physics of ice is straightforward: bright, reflective ice sends a portion of incoming solar energy back into space, while darker ocean absorbs it. Less ice means more absorbed energy and, therefore, more warming.
But the system quickly becomes much more complicated.
How does changing albedo affect cloud formation, particularly over the tropics? And what happens to the climate if those clouds increase—or decrease?
The low clouds are especially important. They can reflect substantial amounts of incoming sunlight back into space. If tropical low clouds diminish, the ocean could absorb significantly more solar energy, accelerating warming.
This is where the bleeding edge begins.
Clouds are arguably the largest remaining uncertainty in our understanding of climate sensitivity. They can both reflect incoming solar radiation and trap outgoing heat. Which effect dominates—and how that balance changes as the planet warms—is one of the great questions in climate science.
My expectation is that the climate system could eventually approach a new equilibrium around +4°C above the preindustrial baseline, perhaps over the course of a couple centuries. That would imply roughly +2–3°C this century, with additional warming continuing into the next.
But that remains uncertain.
The important point is that climate change is not a simple linear equation. It is a massively interconnected system in which changes in one component can alter another, which then feeds back into the first. Ice affects albedo. Albedo affects heating. Heating affects clouds. Clouds affect radiation. Radiation affects ocean temperatures. Ocean temperatures affect evaporation and atmospheric moisture. And the cycle continues.
Everything is nonlinear.
Yet uncertainty about the exact trajectory does not mean uncertainty about what we should do.
The clearest lever we have is still the same: reduce CO₂ emissions and slow the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
And while the long-term equilibrium matters, there is a much more immediate question.
What happens to you over the next five years?
We are already seeing rainfall becoming more intense and, in many places, more destructive—violent. A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, increasing the potential for extreme precipitation. The question isn’t simply how hot the planet might become over the next 50 years.
The more immediate question is:
What is the violent rain going to do to your home, your community, your infrastructure, your insurance—and you—over the next five years?
That is where climate change stops being a distant projection and starts becoming a personal reality.
U.S. retail sales fell unexpectedly by 0.6% month over month in July 2026, coming in well below the forecast of a 0.1% increase. The data, released this morning, points to a significant slowdown in American consumer spending and a reversal of the momentum seen in previous months.
Key Figures From the July Report
Headline retail sales: Down 0.6%, following a revised 0.2% increase in June.
Excluding autos: Down 0.3%, versus expectations for a 0.2% increase.
Excluding autos and gasoline: Down 0.2%, compared with an expected 0.3% increase.
Control group sales: Down 0.4%, missing the projected 0.3% gain.
Bad News for the Economy
The broad-based weakness suggests that American consumers are becoming increasingly constrained by high prices, elevated living costs, and strained household budgets. Discretionary spending appears to be particularly vulnerable as consumers cut back in response to declining purchasing power.
The slowdown is also affecting financial-market expectations, potentially strengthening the case for a more accommodative Federal Reserve monetary policy in the months ahead.
But there is another way to look at these numbers.
Demand Destruction
This may be another indication of demand destruction—a sustained reduction in consumption caused by rising prices, declining purchasing power, supply constraints, or the availability of alternatives.
Climate change can contribute to this process in several ways. Extreme heat, drought, flooding, wildfires, and other climate-related disruptions can damage agricultural production and supply chains, increasing the cost of food and other necessities. Rising insurance, energy, transportation, and infrastructure costs can further squeeze household budgets.
Food prices are particularly important. Climate-driven disruptions to agriculture can contribute to food inflation, creating one of the most direct ways climate change reaches the household budget. When essential goods become more expensive, consumers have less money available for discretionary purchases.
That creates an uncomfortable paradox.
Bad News for Consumers. Good News for the Climate?
For lower-income households, this is unquestionably bad news. Families already living close to the edge have far less ability to absorb higher food, housing, energy, transportation, and insurance costs. For them, demand destruction isn’t a lifestyle choice. It can mean doing without necessities or postponing purchases they would otherwise make.
But from an environmental perspective, declining consumption can have an unexpected benefit.
Our economy is built around a powerful cycle: produce more → sell more → consume more → produce even more. Economic growth has traditionally depended heavily on increasing consumption of energy, materials, goods, and services.
If rising costs begin breaking that cycle, the result could be a gradual decline in resource consumption.
That is the paradox of demand destruction:
What is bad news for the economy can sometimes be good news for the environment.
A reduction in fossil-fuel consumption, material throughput, unnecessary production, and resource-intensive consumption can reduce environmental pressures. In that sense, demand destruction could unintentionally contribute to the transition away from an economic model based on ever-increasing consumption.
The problem is that we should not confuse economic hardship with a successful environmental transition.
There is a profound difference between people consuming less because they have chosen more efficient, sustainable alternatives and people consuming less because they can no longer afford what they need.
The first represents managed transition.
The second represents contraction.
The challenge is to find a way to reduce humanity’s environmental footprint without forcing the people least able to absorb the costs to bear the greatest burden.
That may ultimately be one of the defining economic challenges of climate change: how do we move beyond consumerism without making poverty the mechanism that gets us there?
The climate costs of fossil-fuel dependence are increasingly outweighing its benefits—not in some distant future, but here and now. We are moving beyond arguments about what climate change might cost decades from today. Across the Western world, climate impacts are already imposing costs of hundreds of billions of dollars in real time.
Insurance is only one part of the story.
Infrastructure, agriculture, transportation, labor productivity, public health, energy systems, and financial markets are all beginning to absorb the cost of a destabilizing climate. The economic question is therefore changing. It is no longer simply:
“What will climate change cost us?”
It is increasingly:
“How much are we willing to pay to preserve an energy system that is becoming progressively more expensive to maintain?”
Climate Stress Is Becoming an Economic Stress Test
The physical infrastructure of the global economy is already being affected.
Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc has warned that climate change is putting increasing pressure on European waterways and that substantial infrastructure investment will be needed to keep the Rhine operating as a critical transportation artery.
But the economic importance of waterways extends far beyond shipping.
Rivers, lakes, and reservoirs are also critical components of the energy, industrial, agricultural, municipal, and ecological systems that support modern economies.
When water levels fall or water temperatures rise, power plants can be affected directly. Thermoelectric and nuclear power plants rely heavily on water for cooling. If river flows become too low, or water temperatures become too high, operators may be forced to reduce generation or temporarily shut down units because sufficient cooling capacity is no longer available or because thermal discharge limits are exceeded.
That creates an economic chain reaction:
Lower river flows or higher water temperatures ↓ Reduced cooling capacity ↓ Reduced power generation ↓ Tighter electricity supplies ↓ Higher electricity prices and grid stress ↓ Higher operating costs for industry and consumers
The same waterways that transport fuel, raw materials, agricultural products, chemicals, and manufactured goods can therefore also be essential to producing the electricity needed to move and manufacture those goods.
Water is simultaneously a transportation system, cooling system, industrial input, agricultural resource, and ecological asset.
When that system becomes unstable, multiple economic sectors can be affected at the same time.
Low water levels can also restrict the movement of coal, oil, natural gas, grain, chemicals, construction materials, and other bulk commodities. Barges may have to reduce their loads or make more trips to transport the same volume of goods. In some cases, alternative transportation by rail or truck becomes necessary, increasing fuel consumption, congestion, labor costs, and emissions.
Flooding creates the opposite problem.
Excess water can damage ports, locks, bridges, rail connections, roads, warehouses, industrial facilities, and electrical infrastructure. A waterway can therefore become economically disruptive at both extremes—too little water and too much water.
Agriculture is similarly exposed. Rivers and reservoirs provide irrigation, livestock water, and municipal supplies. Persistent drought can reduce agricultural output while increasing competition among farmers, cities, industry, ecosystems, and energy producers for increasingly scarce water.
There is also a less visible economic cost: water temperature itself is becoming an economic variable.
Warmer rivers can reduce their ability to absorb additional heat from industrial processes and power-plant cooling systems. At the same time, warmer water can stress aquatic ecosystems, fisheries, and drinking-water systems, creating additional regulatory, treatment, and ecological costs.
This produces a broader economic concept that is often missed in conventional disaster accounting:
Waterway disruption is not a single-sector problem. It is a systems problem.
The Rhine and Danube are not simply waterways. They are components of Europe’s economic infrastructure. They connect ports, factories, power plants, farms, cities, mines, warehouses, rail networks, and consumers. When climate conditions interfere with their operation, the economic consequences propagate through the system. A river does not have to disappear to create an economic crisis. It only has to become less reliable. And reliability is one of the most valuable—and often least visible—assets in a modern economy.
The Economic Toll of Extreme Weather
Global extreme weather and natural disasters are generating enormous economic losses. Recent estimates from the International Chamber of Commerce, insurers including Swiss Re, and disaster-loss tracking organizations show that severe convective storms, wildfires, floods, and other extreme events are producing annual losses measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The first half of 2026 alone has already produced approximately $100 billion in global economic losses, while the cumulative economic toll over the past decade has reached roughly $2 trillion, according to recent assessments.
And the year is not over.
The second half of the year normally includes the peak of the North Atlantic hurricane season, creating the potential for another substantial wave of losses.
The Major Economic Drivers
Escalating annual losses. Global disaster losses continue to accumulate at extraordinary levels. The combined economic losses from 2022 and 2023 alone have been estimated at roughly $451 billion.
The concentration of U.S. losses. The United States remains a major source of global insured catastrophe losses. By June 2026, the country had already experienced 12 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, with estimated losses totaling approximately $31.9 billion.
Severe convective storms. Hail, tornadoes, straight-line winds, and other severe thunderstorms have become an increasingly persistent source of financial losses. The United States recorded a record 21 billion-dollar severe-convective-storm events in 2025.
Extreme heat and productivity. The economic damage from climate change is not limited to destroyed buildings and infrastructure. Heat reduces worker productivity, particularly in construction, agriculture, manufacturing, and outdoor occupations. Global heat-related productivity losses have been estimated at roughly 1% of world GDP annually—around $1 trillion.
The long-term U.S. bill. U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters have generated cumulative damages exceeding $3 trillion since systematic tracking began in 1980.
The Trajectory Is the Story
Recent U.S. disaster statistics illustrate the increasing economic burden:
Year
Billion-Dollar Events
Estimated Damage
Major Loss Drivers
2025
23
~$115 billion
Severe storms, wildfires
2024
27
~$182.7 billion
Severe storms, tropical cyclones, extreme heat
2023
28
$145+ billion
Severe storms and other extreme events
The important point is not that every individual disaster can be attributed exclusively to climate change.
The economic signal emerges from the frequency, intensity, persistence, and cumulative cost of extreme conditions.
Climate change does not need to create every storm, flood, drought, or wildfire to transform the economics of risk. It only needs to increase the probability, severity, or duration of damaging events enough to alter the cost structure of society.
That is already happening.
“Demand Destruction” Is Our Friend
This brings us to one of the most powerful—and least appreciated—economic mechanisms in the energy transition:
Demand destruction.
The International Energy Agency has projected that global oil demand will decline more sharply than previously expected in 2026, forecasting a reduction of approximately 1.6 million barrels per day.
The significance extends beyond the number itself.
As an economist, I am less concerned with establishing a specific date by which the world must eliminate fossil fuels than I am with changing the economic forces that sustain fossil-fuel demand.
That distinction matters.
People do not necessarily change because someone wins an argument about climate science. They change because incentives change. Prices change. Risk changes. Availability changes. And eventually, behavior changes.
Money Moves People
I am unlikely to change the minds of the roughly 20% of Americans who are ideologically committed to policies that accelerate fossil-fuel dependence.
But that leaves the vast majority of the population. And economics can do much of the work. Integrated Climate Stewardship begins with reducing unnecessary consumption.
Consumerism drives energy demand, resource extraction, pollution, waste, and habitat destruction. Every unnecessary unit of consumption represents another demand for energy and materials somewhere in the global economy.
Consume less, and demand falls.
Demand falls, and the economic incentive to produce falls.
That is the mechanism.
The Economics of Personal Climate Stewardship
Today, only a small fraction of Americans appear to be pursuing a deliberately structured net-zero lifestyle through continuous behavioral reductions, efficiency improvements, and intentional balancing. But this does not mean the model cannot scale. The critical question is how climate stewardship is presented.
If reducing climate impact is framed exclusively as sacrifice, people resist. If it is framed as economic self-interest, the equation changes.
What happens when people discover that reducing unnecessary consumption can save them thousands of dollars a year?
What happens when energy efficiency lowers household expenses?
When smaller vehicles reduce fuel, maintenance, and insurance costs?
When reducing waste means buying fewer things that do not provide meaningful value?
When local production and durable goods become economically attractive?
When conservation becomes synonymous with financial resilience?
The behavior does not have to begin with ideology.
It can begin with a household budget.
Vote With Your Dollars
This is where the remaining majority of the population becomes economically important.
When millions of people begin making purchasing decisions based on cost, durability, efficiency, resilience, and environmental impact, they collectively alter demand.
When demand changes, markets respond. When fossil-fuel demand declines, the economic incentive to extract, refine, transport, and sell fossil fuels declines with it. This is fundamentally different from waiting for governments to impose every change from the top down. It is a bottom-up economic transition.
People do not have to agree about everything.
They do not have to become climate activists.
They do not even have to agree about climate policy.
They simply have to discover that some forms of consumption are no longer worth what they cost.
The Feedback Loop
The process can become self-reinforcing:
Lower unnecessary consumption ↓ Lower household costs ↓ Lower energy and resource demand ↓ Reduced fossil-fuel demand ↓ Lower economic incentive for fossil-fuel expansion ↓ Greater investment in alternatives and efficiency ↓ Further reductions in fossil-fuel demand
This is an economic feedback loop.
And unlike many climate-policy debates, it does not require everyone to agree on the destination before beginning the journey.
Demand Destruction Is the Transition
The transition away from fossil fuels is often described as a supply problem:
How quickly can we replace coal, oil, and natural gas?
But there is another side of the equation.
How quickly can we reduce the demand that makes fossil-fuel extraction profitable?
That may ultimately be the more powerful question.
We do not need to convince every person to become an environmentalist.
We need to make lower-carbon choices increasingly rational economic choices.
The climate crisis is already generating enormous costs. Insurance premiums are rising. Infrastructure is being stressed. Agricultural productivity is being disrupted. Heat is reducing labor capacity. Extreme weather is destroying capital. Supply chains are becoming more vulnerable.
These costs are not theoretical.
They are appearing on balance sheets, household budgets, insurance statements, government budgets, and corporate earnings reports.
The economic system is beginning to receive the bill.
And money moves people.
Demand destruction is not the enemy of the energy transition.
Although it’s fine when boiled.
