Can We Make it Rain?

My wild ride through the world of "small water cycles"

Dear friends,

When I moved to California over 25 years ago, the spring rain lasted into May, the hills were still green in early summer, and it rained at least a few times in September. The summer dry season was noticeable, but it was just that—a season. And it passed.

I try to hold on to these facts as we’ve watched the water tables drop, the forests dry up and burn, and a host of species suffer all around the West in recent years. I want to stay awake as the baseline shifts toward desertification. But also, just noticing the change—and responding by conserving water in my own life—doesn’t feel like enough.

So I’ve spent the last few years looking at how scientists and policymakers are responding, and the bulk of the conversation focuses on how to portion out the water that we collect when it rains.That focus makes sense, I have often told myself, because the amount of rainwater we get is beyond our control.

As the climate has changed, however, rainwater often comes all at once in destructive quantities, or it doesn’t come at all. And the public conversation has turned to, how do we save more of it when it arrives—and survive when too much of it comes our way.

These are both important goals, but I’ve also learned in recent months that there is a growing number of people who see water—as it moves around in the atmosphere, in plants, and in the soil—as something humans can work with in a way that attracts more water and retains it longer. At the heart of this less common, at times even unpopular, idea is that in addition to the massive global water cycle, wherein larger weather patterns are shaped by the way warm and cool air moves between the ocean and the land, the world is made up of many small, localized water cycles, and that those can be tended by humans and actually were tended by Indigenous people for millennia.

My ears initially perked up when I read an account from farmer Alejandro Carrillo, who runs Las Damas Ranch in the arid Chihuahuan Desert of Northern Mexico, which attributed an increase in rain in the region to the way he has managed his land. “I think we’re getting 10–20 percent more. My neighbors are getting the extra rain, too,” he told me over the phone.

Carrillo inherited the ranch from his father over a decade ago and left a career in IT to ranch nearly full time. He has changed the ranch’s practices rather dramatically, from conventional grazing (i.e., overgrazing) to the kind of regenerative managed grazing that involves moving cattle between smaller paddocks every few days, allowing the land to rest in between.

“It has been an amazing change,” Carrillo said, explaining that what had been many acres of annual grassland has been replaced by a combination of perennial grasses and flowering forbs that have attracted a wide range of birds and pollinators. “The weeds that come in first, they’re nature’s way of healing the soil. And then the grasses push out the weeds. When you only grow annual grasses, they die as soon as it stops raining. The perennials stay alive through the dry season. Even if it’s only a little bit of green, it makes a difference for the microorganisms in the soil, it keeps them alive.” Over time, he has captured a great deal of water in the soil, and that has allowed him to keep his animals fed all year long—a rare occurrence for ranchers in the desert region.

“Typically, when you raise livestock in those conditions you need to rely on someone else to grow their food—alfalfa or oat grass or even soy,” Carrillo told me. “Millions of acres [elsewhere] are being used to grow food for animals, but ranches could be self-sufficient. Our cattle don’t eat anything off the ranch.”

(I’ll briefly pause here to acknowledge the raging debate about whether we need to eat less beef to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions or simply change the way we raise cattle. I believe firmly we need to do both—eat much less beef and raise the animals that we do eat using regenerative practices. Of course, the two changes could go hand in hand: The feedlot system is what makes such insanely cheap beef possible, and if that went away very few Americans would be able to afford to eat anywhere near the current average of 57 pounds of beef a year.)

All this tracked with what I’ve heard about the benefits of regenerative practices. But the idea that retaining more moisture in the soil and plants creates more evapotranspiration and clouds over his land, and that those clouds might attract more rain, was new to me. And honestly, it sounded too good to be true.

If it’s possible to attract more rain to rapidly desertifying areas through regenerative land management, why are the federal and local governments spending millions “seeding clouds” (adding liquid silver iodide to clouds) to boost snow and rainfall in eight states including Texas, Utah, Colorado, and California? What was I missing?

I spoke with Project Drawdown senior scientist Paul West, and he was skeptical about Carrillo’s claims: “Generally speaking, land cover change in the midlatitudes doesn’t have as much impact on local weather as…the amount that the wind is moving air temperature and moisture around.” He said that in the tropics, a change in land cover can influence the amount of rainfall at a local scale, and that when you clear a forest to plant acres of soy or graze cattle, it brings down the amount of rainfall in the region.

That all made sense to me, but I kept reading. Carillo pointed me to Walter Jenhe, an Australian microbiologist who has been talking for years about the necessity of rebuilding the “soil carbon sponge” and its potential role in revitalizing dry areas and restoring water cycles. Jenhe, and a handful of scientists he works with, believe that water plays as crucial a role in the regulation of the climate as carbon does—but because it’s more difficult to model, it hasn’t received as much attention.

Next I read Judith Schwartz’s 2016 book, “Water in Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World,” which explores the links between deforestation, industrial monocrop agriculture, and the loss of moisture on the landscape. She covers a wide array of efforts to rebuild small water cycles all over the world; people are gradually bringing dry degraded landscapes back to life through the addition of more plant cover and trees to landscapes, and more mycelium in the ground to stabilize and build soil.

Microbes from plants and healthy soil help create cloud cover—and some evidence suggests that the rain dances that Indigenous people did all over the world may have in fact stirred up microbes and released them into the air.

Schwartz pointed to a research paper from forest ecologist Douglas Sheil that reads: “Most life on land depends on water from rain, but much of the rain on land may also depend on life.”

Sheil also worked with other researchers to study the role forests play in regulating global temperature and producing and cycling fresh water. “The Amazon rainforest hydrates much of the hemisphere and acts as a regulator,” Schwartz wrote about the research at the time, describing the clouds above the forest as “a green ocean—a sea of vapor, waves of humidity.”

“The soil-plant-sky circuit runs quickly. Rate of transpiration in the Amazon basin is such that individual trees are veritable fountains, transferring large quantities of water from the ground and into the air like a natural spring. A single tree can transpire over 1,000 liters of water,” Schwartz continued. She also looked at the work of scientists who have found that forests don’t merely grow in wet areas, they create wet areas in a “tug of war between forest and ocean.”

Photo by Rifqi Ramadhan.

This is especially painful to read about now, as scientists have observed what may be a tipping point in the Amazon over just the last few years, as deforestation has led to an overall trend toward aridity and nearly half the regions of Brazil just saw their driest periods in 50 years.

I talked to Alpha Lo, physicist, cofounder of the Regenerative Water Alliance, and the voice behind the very wonky Climate Water Project newsletter. He told me his goal with the project is to inform more people of the key role water plays in regulating the climate: “We face water scarcity and climate disaster—floods, fires, droughts and heat waves. Restoring the water cycle can really help lessen a lot of those problems. And restoring the water cycle entails restoring ecosystems.”

That would involve not just regenerating the soil and bringing back more plants and trees, but finding more ways to slow down water and send it through the soil before it runs into the ocean. Also part of the puzzle are undamming rivers, creating and restoring more wetlands, allowing more beavers on the landscape (they’re famous water spreaders) and building bioswales that absorb the water along roadsides to slow it down and store more of it in aquifers.

The idea that humans can alter the landscape to potentially attract more rain, “sounds a little bit woo-woo, at least it did to me when I started learning about it,” Lo added. “I thought it was just the permaculturists and eco-people saying it. And I was kind of surprised to see that climate scientists studied the connection of land use with rain. Land use changes can reduce evapotranspiration, which then leads to loss of rain. Syukuro Manabe, who won the Nobel Prize in 2021 for his carbon work, also looked at how the impact of the land on rain.” In the 1960s, around the same time Manabe developed his now-renowned climate model, Lo says he also developed a soil model, which showed that if soil absorbs more rain, then more rain will fall.

Lo has interviewed a number of scientists on the topic in the last year, including Mediterranean climate scientist Millán Millán, who spent years studying the way land use changes have impacted the number of storms in the Mediterranean, and who predicted many of the extreme hydrometeorological events that have been occurring in Europe over the last few years.

Lo told me, “Millán was asked by the European Commission to look into why Spain was losing its rain. He said they were paving over the land and deforesting, so there's less evapotranspiration. They were very interested in what he had to say at first and at some point, he said, ‘Well, we have to restore the land.’ And the tourism commission really didn't like that because they were continuing to develop the land instead. So the conversation came to an abrupt stop. But ultimately, the conversation about water is like the one about carbon. No one wants to reduce the number of cars on the road or stop using air conditioning. And yet the question about how to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere is seen as so pressing, we’re still talking about it. Most of us are not talking about how to repair the water cycle.”

When I asked Lo about the idea that one ranch could impact the rainfall it received, he said it wasn’t impossible—but there are many factors that impact whether or not rainstorms pass over one piece of land. In his interview with Millán , the scientist estimated that an area of land would need to be at least 36 square miles to see impact of its own restoration on its overall rainfall, because of the way moisture in the air moves around. But Lo adds more complexity to that number, saying, “As long as the winds are not too big—trees can also slow down the wind, and if you're in more of a valley Rajendra Singh says after we restore approximately 1,000 acres [1.5 square mile], then the rains will start increasing.”

Ultimately, the question of whether one farmer or rancher can attract rain to their own land may not be all that pertinent in what needs to be a much larger systemic change. But if landowners and communities have the tools to help more overall moisture cycle above and below their land, it could go part of the way toward reversing course in some of the fast-drying regions of the world.

And for ranchers like Carrillo, the other benefits of storing more water in the soil and rebuilding the ecosystem are many. In his case the largest benefit might be the temperature of the ranch itself, which he says stays about 5 degrees cooler on hot summer days thanks to the fact that the soil is covered with a lush variety of plants. “One day it was 116 degrees on the surface of the car while I was driving to the ranch, and when I arrived, it was only 85 outside.” And when torrential rains hit last winter, sending nine inches down in 10 days, his land was able to absorb it, whereas “most of it poured off [his] neighbor’s land” and took a massive quantity of soil with it.

Climate news you might have missed

COPs and robbers

COP28, the UN Climate summit, begins this week, and the latest news is so bleak it’s almost comical. The event’s president, Sultan Al-Jabar, is also the leader of the United Arab Emirates (UAE)’s state oil company, Adnoc. He was called out this week for making a brazen plan to meet with leaders from 15 nations to make deals related to oil and gas extraction prior to the official talks. On Monday, the BBC obtained documents prepared for the meetings that had been written by Adnoc and the UAE’s state alternative energy company Masdar.

The documents encouraged continued extraction and, in one striking example, advised that Al-Jabar reassure leaders from Venezuela and Saudi Arabia (both considerable oil producers) that “there is no conflict between any country’s sustainable development of natural resources and its commitment to climate change.” It’s not clear whether the messages Adnoc and Masdar wrote were actually delivered in the meetings that have taken place (John Kerry claims they were not), but the mere fact that companies and their leaders perceived these deals to be on the table is far from confidence-inspiring. Frankly, they cast an even larger shadow over the COP itself.

Temperatures in Dubai, where an estimated 70,000 people will be attending the talks, are projected for the mid-80s this week, but I’m still thinking about the migrant workers who toiled to build a set of facilities designed especially for the event as temperatures spike as high as 106 degrees earlier this fall. Not to mention the hundreds of private jets the world leaders will be taking to get there (last year it was over 400).

Inequity looms large

The link between climate and inequity is also on my mind once again as a recent Oxfam report found that the richest 1 percent of humanity is responsible for more emissions than the poorest 66 percent. That group includes 77 million people worldwide who are paid more than US$140,000 a year—which includes a great deal more Americans than we tend to assume when we hear the term “1 percent.”

Rebecca Solnit zoomed in on an even smaller group, the world’s billionaires. Those 81 individuals, who are mostly older, white, and male, hold more wealth than half of all humanity, and are all much too enamored with their own ideas when it comes to climate solutions. One quarter of them live in the U.S. Bill Gates, for example, is pouring money into direct air capture and solar radiation management, two ideas that have received mixed reviews from scientists. “They use their power in arbitrary, reckless and often environmentally destructive ways,” Solnit concluded.

Many of us have our eyes on the climate-related Loss and Damage Fund (the closest thing to climate reparations for low-income countries), as a group of delegates from multiple countries hash it out. While a draft was reached earlier this month, the negotiations in Dubai will likely be tense, and delegates from the U.S. are apparently stubbornly insisting that the fund remain voluntary—which, if I dare say, seems like the most American move ever. The fund will be hosted by the World Bank, a fact that disappointed a number of delegates from the lower-income countries standing to receive funds, who have been on the receiving end of a whole range of crushing debt and harsh penalties from the institution in recent decades.

Swifties for climate action?

A lot of people sent me that Taylor Swift-could-be-dating-a-climate-scientist meme, and every time it came my way, I had the same two thoughts: 1) Are we talking about the same Taylor Swift? And 2) The climate crisis is bound to catch up with her sooner or later.

Well, it turns out it did catch up to her—and way too soon! When a fan died at one of Swift’s concerts where water bottles were forbidden during an extreme heat wave in Rio last week, she declared herself devastated on Instagram and cancelled the show the following night. But she has yet to acknowledge the very likely connection to extreme heat. And yet, as Emily Atkin and Arielle Samuelson from the climate newsletter Heated pointed out, the event has put her in a unique position to start calling attention to the need to keep more people safe at concerts and sporting events as the climate warms.

“If megastars like Taylor Swift want to keep touring the ever-warming planet to bring tens of thousands of people in close outdoor quarters together, without deadly consequences, experts say they not only have to take more seriously the dangers of extreme heat—they have to be more vocal about the reason it’s so hot in the first place,” the duo wrote this week.

They spoke with Jeff Goodell, author of  The Heat Will Kill You First, who added that there are plenty of ideas about how to protect people from extreme heat but “a lack of collective will to implement those ideas.” And that’s precisely where Taylor—and other superstars like her—can work their magic.

On the brighter side

1. A 31,000-acre forested region in far northern Maine has been returned to Penobscot tribal ownership. As the Washington Post story reads:

   
   “For most of the past two centuries, Western conservationists have largely ignored Indigenous people’s knowledge of landscapes and wildlife, along with tribes’ historic claims to the land. But that is no longer tenable. Worldwide, Indigenous-managed lands host 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, by some estimates, and encompass much of the world’s remaining intact forests, savannas and marshes. If environmentalists and political leaders hope to conserve more natural landscapes, including carbon sinks and critical buffer ecosystems such as wetlands that can protect against the harms of climate change, collaboration with tribal nation leaders is critical.”

2. ​On a related note, the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona plans to cover its canal with solar panels to slow evaporation while generating energy. It’s an approach that has been discussed and diagrammed throughout the West, but this is the first time it has actually been put in place. I am so curious to see if it’s the catch-all solution many people are hoping it will be.

3. And since we’re on a roll, I’ll also mention that the Chumash Tribe is leading an effort to turn a section of coastline along California’s Central Coast into a marine sanctuary six times the size of Yosemite National Park. The sanctuary “would protect 150 miles of coastline and 5,600 square miles of the Pacific Ocean.” 

4. Ninety percent of the iconic redwood trees in California’s Big Basin Park have resprouted 2.5 years after a massive wildfire.
   

Take care of yourselves,
Twilight

Top banner courtesy of Mara Greenaway.