In the spring of 2014, an acrimonious debate erupted in the scientific literature and the blogosphere over the causes of the enduring drought in the American Southwest, then into its third year. No one was disputing the severity of the drought, though the one in the 1930s was more severe and the drought of the 1990s more prolonged, at least so far. Towns all over a clutch of western states had to ration water. California for the first time was invoking its right to stop the depletion of underground water sources. Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency. President Obama came carrying aid. Lake Mead, the Colorado’s major reservoir and the source of drinking water for a dozen cities, including the ever-expanding Las Vegas, had sunk to levels not experienced since the Hoover dam was built, threatening even its hydroelectric capabilities.
A few sturdy libertarian fruitcakes aside, watering lawns in daytime became an anti-social act.1 A winemaker of my acquaintance was obliged to thin his 2014 crop almost to nothing just to keep the vines alive, and even then he had to tanker in water when his wells started to sputter. Oprah Winfrey’s decision to do the same tanker-thing for her mansion’s swimming pool brought down unaccustomed negative publicity on her head. In farm country, spray-irrigation-system salespeople were falling on hard times, but the drip irrigation guys were going gangbusters. A long-hoped-for El Niño failed to materialize — or was late, or was weak — late in the year it was still uncertain, except that the rains never came, except in the occasional, and rather useless, torrent. Car washes started to recycle water. Washing sidewalks became a criminal offence.
Everyone agreed the drought was awful, but they couldn’t agree on what caused it. Was it natural variability, some hitherto unexplored climatic cycle, or was it climate change? If the latter, then it raised the unnerving possibility that it might never go away. No wonder emotions were running high. The precipitating event of the climate-change dust-up was a posting on the White House website, a six-page “rebuttal” to a University of Colorado professor of environmental studies, Roger Pielke, self-described as a long-time analyst of climate-related disaster losses. Pielke had testified before a congressional committee the previous year and his three main conclusions were these: first, there exists exceedingly little scientific support for claims that hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and drought have increased in frequency or intensity on climate timescales either in the United States or globally; second, on climate timescales, it is incorrect to link the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases; and third, that “these conclusions are supported by a broad scientific consensus, including that recently reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its fifth assessment report (2013) as well as in its recent special report on extreme events (2012).” The first two assertions went by largely without comment; they were similar enough to that of other skeptics summoned by the same congressional committee that they raised few eyebrows. The third conclusion, though: Had the IPCC “supported” these conclusions, really? John Holdren, Obama’s chief science adviser, had said before the same committee (rather gently, I thought) that Pielke was “outside the scientific mainstream.” Pielke, rather less restrained, accused Holdren of indulging in voodoo science. At this point, New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin weighed in but made the elementary mistake of respectfully quoting Pielke, bringing down some of the calumny on his own head, the angriest from a thinkprogress.org blogger named Joe Romm, who dismissed Pielke as a mere “political scientist” (a low blow that!) and called Revkin a naïf.
Some of the disagreements over drought go a little deeper than this, though. It was interesting that two peer-reviewed papers published in 2012 came to almost opposite conclusions about global droughts. A paper in Nature carried the headline, “Little Change in Global Drought over the Past 60 Years”; another paper, in the journal Nature Climate Change, was titled “Increasing Drought under Global Warming in Observations and Models.” Both papers were cited in a review subsequently published in Nature Climate Change, neutrally subtitled “Global Warming and Changes in Drought,” which in turn came to a third conclusion, that “increased heating from global warming may not cause droughts but it is expected that when droughts occur they are apt to set in quicker and be more intense.”2
Revkin, manfully resisting slamming Romm for calling him a Pielke toady, had another go at the issue, this time invoking two more scientists, both with reputations rather hard to denigrate. The first was Martin Hoerling, who studies climate extremes for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which also runs the National Hurricane Center; the other was Richard Seager, a climate scientist who studies water issues at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Seager had earlier told another New York Times reporter, Justin Gillis, that he was “pretty sure” the severity of the current drought is due to natural variability rather than climate change.3
Nevertheless, both scientists agreed with the Nature Climate Change paper that climate change has exacerbating effects. Water is being used more intensively by a larger population than in earlier droughts, reducing resiliency. Further, higher temperatures evaporate water faster, melt snow faster, and dry out the ground faster.4
So far, I’ve been concentrating on the American Southwest. But, in all this, California and its neighbours are just stand-ins for droughts elsewhere, some of them just as prolonged and sometimes even more severe: Australia, of course — the Millennium Drought, the formerly Fertile Crescent (Iraq, Syria, parts of Turkey), southwestern Brazil, much of southern India, parts of the Sahel, the North China plains, southern Africa — many droughts, in all regions. Not all of them are caused by climate change and a warming globe, but they all exist in in an increasingly warmer environment. Which, yes, makes them worse. Possibly much worse.
So climate change is not off the hook. Some years ago, the hard-headed folk of the insurance industry, led by Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, got together with a clutch of climate, weather, and atmospheric scientists to see if they could arrive at a consensus about the damage climate change might be doing. The meeting concluded with a carefully worded consensus, that “changing patterns of extreme weather events are drivers for recent increases in global losses.” Climate change, the meeting suggested, may not be the dominant factor, “[but] it has become clear that a relevant portion of damages can be attributed to global warming.” Munich Re should know — the company has been diligently accumulating catastrophe data over millenniums. (It has a database dating back to the year 79, listing twenty-two thousand natural disasters.) As Quirin Schiermeier reported in Nature, the insurance giant’s NatCat service shows that the frequency of weather-related catastrophes has increased sixfold since the 1950s, while the number of non-weather-related incidents (volcanoes, earthquakes, and the rest) increased only marginally.5
What are these “weather-related catastrophes”? Storms — hurricanes and typhoons, also tornadoes, and in winter, ice storms and severe blizzards. Exceptional rains leading to flooding, mudslides, and dam breaches. Storm surges damaging coastal communities (and, in the much longer term, rising sea levels drowning whole regions or even countries). Drought, of course.
Another set of hard heads can be found at the World Bank. In an analysis co-authored by Jamal Saghir, chair of the bank’s water sector board, the bank acknowledges the obvious, that climate change is real, and suggests that “taking prudent measures to plan for and adapt to climate change must become an integral part of the Bank’s water practice.” And the report adds:
There is now ample evidence that increased hydrologic variability and change in climate has and will continue have a profound impact on the water sector through the hydrologic cycle, water availability, water demand, and water allocation at the global, regional, basin, and local levels. Many economies are at risk of significant episodic shocks and worsened chronic water scarcity and security. This can have direct and severe ramifications on the economy, poverty, public health and ecosystem viability.6
At the same time, the report also recognizes that climate was not the only risk, though it was an enabler of risk:
Future water availability and use will also depend on non-climatic factors. Climate change is only one of many factors that will determine future patterns of water availability and use. In the absence of policy changes, non-climatic factors are likely to aggravate or attenuate the adverse effects of climate change on water availability and quality, as well as have a significant influence on water demand. Population growth and economic development will play a dominant role. Non-climatic impacts could be generated through many realms — from population growth, migration and income to technologies and infrastructure to land-use patterns and agricultural activities/irrigation. Such non-climatic drivers could dwarf the impacts attributed to climate change alone.
So what is the IPCC’s current assessment of these issues?
Floods and Droughts
Elementary physics would suggest that as the globe warms, evaporation will increase. No one disputes that, but measuring or modelling the increases are much trickier, and so is figuring out where the extra water will go. It is known that the moisture content of the lower atmosphere has been increasing at about 1 percent per decade, at least since the 1980s, and this is true for the air over land as well as over the oceans. The likelihood is that for every degree the planet warms, total evaporation, and therefore precipitation, will increase by about 2 percent. Much of that, of course, will fall back on the sea, simply because the sea covers more area than land. But where it will fall on land is harder to say. Climate modelling is still not fine-grained enough to make accurate regional projections, but some kind of consensus has emerged: higher latitudes, from about 30° north to about 85° north, things are going to get wetter, and in lower latitudes, from about 10° south to 30° north, things are going to get drier, perhaps a lot drier. The Southern Hemisphere is not quite a mirror image — ocean currents and landforms are quite different — but the same tendencies are likely there too. Those two trends, more water in higher latitudes, less in lower latitudes, have actually been intensifying since about 1900.
There is also considerable evidence that the heavier rain in higher latitudes, as well as the scantier rain in lower latitudes, will come in what the IPCC calls “heavy or extreme precipitation events” — that is, in monsoon-style downpours. The expectation is that such events will increase about 7 percent for every degree the planet warms. There is certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence that this is happening. In July 2014, parts of Connecticut and Long Island got more than a dozen inches of rain in a few hours, and California’s welcome but insufficient downpour in December was similarly intense. The consequences are easy enough to see: flash floods, roads and bridges washed away, crops eroded and possibly destroyed. Many regions may have to become dependent for their water on a few massive storms instead of on steady rain. England, to take an example from recent years, will have to become more adept at flood management.
These heavier downpours may not be all bad. An intriguing study in Nature Climate Change suggests that torrential rainfall is more efficient at restoring depleting aquifers than had been assumed, better even than steadier precipitation. This goes against the conventional wisdom, which has it that the heavier rains ran off the land into the oceans before they could affect groundwater. The study was done over a fifty-five-year period in Tanzania, in what the authors call the “semi-arid tropics,” where “episodic recharge interrupts multiannual recessions in groundwater levels, maintaining the water security of the groundwater-dependent communities in this region.” Their conclusion was also counterintuitive: increased use of aquifers would likely be a viable adaptation to increasing variability and potential shortages.7
The flipside of flooding is, of course, drought. As the heated debate over the California drought shows, it can be difficult to pinpoint real causes. The measure most commonly used is called the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), named after the hydrologist Wayne Palmer, who invented it. But it is not very easy to apply, being actually three indexes in one: the Palmer-Z Index, which tries to show how short-term (monthly) moisture conditions depart from normal; the Palmer Drought Index, which show longer-term (annual) changes in moisture conditions; and the Palmer Hydrological Drought Index, which reflects groundwater conditions, reservoir levels, and more. The validity of the Palmer results depends on accuracy of data input, a scientific truism after all, and from most parts of the world data are spotty, relying too much on anecdotal evidence. Still, the IPCC has concluded that the PDSI for the planet as a whole shows droughts increasing in length and severity, though their confidence level for this assumption is not very high — “the patterns are complex.” As with precipitation, some areas have become wetter, especially in higher latitudes, while others have become notably drier. Globally, soil moisture has decreased. Interestingly, droughts in the United States, except for in the Southwest, have decreased.
Storms
One of the most common assumptions is that tropical cyclones are increasing in numbers and severity. This assumption is wrong in its essence, though not in all its details.
First of all, there is actually no clear trend in the frequency of tropical cyclones, according to the IPCC. Some years there are plenty, in other years not. In 2005 there were so many that the National Hurricane Center ran out of names and had to start the alphabet again; in 2013, there were only a handful. In 2014, the eastern Pacific reached Y in the alphabet, the Atlantic only H. There is some evidence, though it is disputed, that the number of cyclones will go down as a consequence of climate change, since high-altitude winds are likely to become more prevalent, which would undercut storm development — hurricanes, powerful as they are, are nevertheless vulnerable to wind shear. It is true that the number of Atlantic hurricanes has been increasing since about the 1970s. On the other hand, that increase was predicted by long-term climatic cycles, and likely has nothing to do with global warming.
The evidence is not much better that hurricanes have become more intense as the planet warms. On the contrary, a new study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in November 2014 that assessed cloud-top temperature data over thirty years found “zero increase worldwide in the average potential intensity of storms.”8 In the Atlantic basin, only five Category 5 hurricanes have ever made landfall on continental America, although, of course, accurate records don’t go back much before 1900. The first was an unnamed storm that struck the Florida Keys in 1935, when the barometer fell to an extraordinarily low 89,200 pascals (892 millibars). The second was Hurricane Camille in 1969, still the strongest Atlantic storm ever recorded, carrying winds gusting to 305 kilometres an hour and pushing a storm surge that reached 7.6 metres above mean tide levels. The other three, it is true, were in the last few decades: Hurricane Andrew of 1992, and two in 2007, Hurricane Dean, which hit the Yucatan with winds of 296 kilometres an hour, and a week later, Hurricane Felix, which struck as far south as Nicaragua and Honduras, a most unusual track.
Nevertheless, a few things are happening as a result of climate change that impact on the severity of storms. The first is warming sea surface temperatures, or SSTs. A precondition for hurricane formation is that the ocean surface should be at least twenty-six degrees Celsius, and preferably twenty-six and a half or higher. No one really knows why this number is the magic one. It has to do with the climatological factors governing tropical oceans. Temperatures can be higher than twenty-six, but not lower — the higher they are, the greater the potential for damaging convection currents to occur. Higher temperatures don’t increase the probability that a system will coalesce into a hurricane, but they will tend to make that hurricane more intense. If the seas warm further, warmer water will be found further north, which means that cyclone formation can then occur outside what has historically been the “normal” tracks. Worse, at least for those of us living on Atlantic shores in latitudes higher than, say, 40 North, is that hurricanes approaching our latitudes will no longer cross waters cool enough to reduce their intensity. That is, more strong hurricanes will reach further north than before.9
The second consequence of climate change is that the lower troposphere carries more moisture than before, and moisture is the fuel for hurricanes.
On tornadoes, the evidence is much clearer. They have not gotten bigger or more frequent. There are actually fewer days with tornadoes than there were, but more days with clusters of tornadoes, rather than singletons. No one knows why this is so.
Glaciers and Snow Cover
On the topic of glaciers and snow cover, the IPCC is confident: continuing decrease in glacial mass — but not everywhere. Decrease in snow cover — but not in all regions. Earlier peak runoff from glaciers and snowmelt — pretty much everywhere.
What is also clear is that glacial shrinking is already having dire consequences, and not just because glaciers are pretty to look at and will contribute to sea-level rises (almost a third of the rise to date is caused by glacial melt). Melting is consequential because of the number of people who depend on the reliable water glaciers provide through seasonal melting for their livelihoods, indeed, for their lives. This is as true of the rich world (western Canadian prairie water is at least partly dependent on glacial melt) as it is of the poor world — Nepal, Bolivia, and other Andean countries. Moreover, shrinking snow cover in multiple places is not just a question of having to move ski resorts to higher elevations; the snowpack keeps water through the wet season to provide it in the dry and hot season, and this reliability has kept farmers, towns, and cities supplied with predicable water. If it melts faster, new reservoirs will have to be built — and we know the animus against new dams.
There are thought to be somewhere around 150,000 glaciers in the world. Except the high-altitude Himalayan glaciers, above fifty-five hundred metres, pretty much all of them are shrinking. Some disappearing glaciers and snowcaps are more visible than others. Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro is perhaps the most obvious because it is visible from afar to the thousands of tourists who come for the surrounding game parks. The Ruwenzori mountain glaciers on the border between Uganda and Congo are melting just as fast, but hardly anyone from the outside world notices because tourism there is minuscule. Glaciers at polar latitudes and at exceptional elevations shrink slowly, whereas the world’s tropical glaciers (71 percent of them located in Peru) are disappearing more rapidly. Some, such as Chacaltaya in Bolivia, have disappeared altogether, leaving what was once the world’s highest altitude ski area still high but now dry, “the lodge, still stocked with rental gear and decorated with ski murals, sits mostly abandoned” — this from an excellent report by Elisabeth Rosenthal, in the New York Times.10
The state of the Andean glaciers is dire. The World Bank, not usually given to alarmist prose, calls the disappearance of South American glaciers a “slow-moving catastrophe.”11 During heavy rain, as the bank pointed out, the ice masses on the mountains store the precipitation as snow that melts in the dry season and feeds the water into the rivers below. When the glaciers no longer do this — and they are forecast to disappear completely within thirty years — they will no longer provide the main source of water for around forty million people from Columbia to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile.
El Alto, Bolivia, the poorer suburb of La Paz, could become the first major population centre to become a casualty of climate change.12 The damage could be mitigated by prudent management and the construction of reservoirs, but there is scant sign of that happening.
Peru, a well-managed country with ample resources, is doing better. Three of the country’s watersheds have set up programs to work with local people to adapt to more efficient irrigation and better conservation. One of the aims is to experiment with crops that use less water, and to reforest where practical. Regionally, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru have set up a joint study project on glacial retreat with financing from the Japanese government and the Global Environment Fund.
Mitigation is the aim, not prevention. It is too late for that.
The issue in the high Himalayas is quite different and commonly misunderstood. Richard Armstrong, a glaciologist at the CIRES National Snow and Ice Data Center who has studied the matter, found many misconceptions. (CIRES, or Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Studies, is a joint project of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado, by no coincidence the home university of Roger Pielke of drought fame.) “We’ve all heard these stories about how Himalayan glaciers are melting faster than anywhere else, drinking water is disappearing, there will be widespread catastrophic floods, etc.,” Armstrong said. “Well, when you start looking, there’s really no data to support those statements.”13
Glaciers above fifty-five hundred metres are not melting and may even be growing in mass. On the other hand, more than half the glacial ice at those altitudes never melts, at any time of the year, making its stored water more or less useless for humans. In fact, glacial melt contributes only a few percentage points of stream flow in the lower river basins. As the globe warms, more of the precipitation lower down will fall as rain and not as snow, and that rain will have to be captured and stored if it is to be used. This means more dams, and quickly.
European glaciers, for their part, are in full retreat — more than half the ice has vanished since comprehensive mapping began in the late nineteenth century. The Norwegians produce most of their electricity from glacial-melt hydro stations and are contemplating big increases in wind power as that resource diminishes. In Switzerland and Austria, mountain and ski resorts are attempting to adapt, by moving higher up the slopes, by creating more snow of their own, or, in a couple of particularly pathetic cases, by laying insulating blankets over the ski runs to prevent melting. The Italian ski resort at Vedretta Piana is using snowplows to push snow off the glacier higher up the slopes — hastening the demise of the glacier itself.14
North American glaciers have been retreating an average of eighteen metres a year since about 1950, when careful measurement began. Once, there were 150 ice sheets in Glacier National Park, straddling the border between British Columbia and Washington State. When measured a decade or so ago, there were 37. In 2014, there were 25, and in 30 years there may be none. All the park’s glaciers have retreated dramatically since the middle of the nineteenth century. Canada’s Athabasca Glacier, an outflow from the Columbia Icefield in Jasper National Park, is the most visited (and the most measured) glacier on the continent. Because more snow still falls in a year than can melt in the short summers, the ice still accumulates at high altitudes and creeps forward at a couple of centimetres a day, spilling (if that’s the right word for such stately movement) from the icefield over three bedrock steps, a very slow and cold waterfall. Despite all this, the tongue of the glacier is melting fast — the glacier has lost half its volume and has retreated one and a half kilometres over the last 125 years. Every year, British Columbia’s glaciers shed the equivalent of 10 percent of the Mississippi River’s flow because of melting.
Despite a brutally cold winter in 2013-2014 (caused by an unusual polar vortex, itself plausibly caused by melting Arctic ice), the snow on North America’s mountains continued its retreat. In the last forty-seven years, in the calculation of Porter Fox of Powder magazine, the skiing bible, two and a half million square kilometres of spring snow cover has disappeared in the Northern Hemisphere. It is likely, Fox says, that somewhere between 25 and 100 percent of snow at America’s ski resorts will disappear by 2100.
As Fox wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times,
I was floored by how much snow had already disappeared from the planet, not to mention how much was predicted to melt in my lifetime. The ski season in parts of British Columbia is four to five weeks shorter than it was 50 years ago, and in eastern Canada, the season is predicted to drop to less than two months by mid-century. At Lake Tahoe, spring now arrives two and a half weeks earlier, and some computer models predict that the Pacific Northwest will receive 40 to 70 percent less snow by 2050. If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise — they grew 41 percent between 1990 and 2008 — then snowfall, winter and skiing will no longer exist as we know them by the end of the century.15
The median date of snowmelt in the Colorado Rockies shifted two to three weeks earlier from 1978 to 2007. In Washington, the Cascades lost nearly a quarter of their snowpack from 1930 to 2007.16
Should the water world be concerned that ski resorts might close and that sales of snowmobiles are going down the toilet? Yes. Snowmelt in the Sierras (and other ranges along the west coast of America) feed the Colorado and other rivers, and contributes precious water to one of the most productive agricultural zones on earth. Less snow means less food — or more expensive food, as other, more difficult, water sources are found or created. This is true in the Caucasus, the Alps, the Nepalese Himalayas, and elsewhere. There are ways to mitigate the damage — more storage is one of them — but they will be expensive and of uncertain utility.
Sea-Level Rise
The “debate” about sea-level rise has been so extravagant on both sides that it would be entertaining if the consequences weren’t so serious. In a way, Al Gore started it. His suggestion that sea levels would rise six metres “in the near future,” swamping London and a baker’s dozen other cities (and putting New York skyscrapers half under water, according to one An Inconvenient Truth graphic) was widely panned by reputable scientists, and drew a flood of retaliatory condemnation down on his head, a flood whose eddies were still being felt in 2014. Christopher Booker, writing in the reliably conservative Daily Telegraph in London, called sea-level rise “the greatest lie ever told.”17 As whoppers go, this statement must itself be right up there with the best of them. The Telegraph’s equally reliable junk-science-loving companion, the weekly Spectator magazine, ran a cover story featuring the same anti-hero, “the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the International Union for Quaternary Science’s (INQUA) Commission on Sea Level Change,” who was able to assure readers that this whole notion of sea-level rise was “nothing but a colossal scare story” and that sea levels hadn’t changed in fifty years. Never mind that INQUA has disavowed Mörner, has disbanded its Commission on Sea Level Change, and has felt the need to strongly affirm its belief in both climate change and rising sea levels — none of this made it through Booker’s ideological filters.
So what is the truth?
The truth is, the truth is rather hard to measure. The sea is a restless thing, with strong and weak currents, tides that depend on moon phases, an overturning circulation that periodically brings deep cold water to the surface (such as, El Niño), and other perturbations. The North Atlantic gyre means, for example, that the centre of the ocean is higher than its perimeter. All this is complicated by the fact that land is rising in spots after being crushed under the last ice age. Or sinking, like Nova Scotia, which has finished its rebound and is now settling back down again. All of this is complicated further by the fact that certain parts of the oceans are saltier than others, and this makes measuring pan-ocean densities very difficult.
Nevertheless, metadata from dozens of studies show more or less the same thing: the ocean levels are rising, though not to Gore-ish levels. Much of the rise to date, about a third of a metre per century, is due to thermal expansion as the oceans warm, and to glacial melt. Not much, so far, has been due to Greenland and Antarctic melt, but when that happens, the rise will likely accelerate. The IPCC’s estimate is that the rise will reach two-thirds of a metre per century by 2100, which would double the current rate, “but the upper end could be much higher.” These numbers were confirmed early in 2015 by a team of scientists from Harvard, with one particularly scary confirmation: the rise is already accelerating.18
The IPCC’s report lays out a number of scenarios. On the Pollyannaish side, the world gets its emissions under control, limiting the increase to twenty-five centimetres this century, a little more than the twenty centimetres of the twentieth century, but not catastrophically so. On the gloomier side, if emissions continue unchecked, sea levels could rise up to ninety centimetres this century. That, pace Al Gore, would put many of the world’s major cities at risk, including London, Shanghai, Venice, Sydney, Miami, New Orleans, and New York. Entire countries like Bangladesh would be underwater.
Even the half metre we’ve had to date has been causing coastal erosion and increased damage because of storm surges. For the provision of fresh water to people who currently have little or have unsafe supplies, the worst consequence will be the diversion of precious funds and energy to solve a problem not of their making.
Global warming may not cause droughts, but it does make them worse. It may not cause more storms, but it is extending their range. It does cause glacial melt and reduced snow cover, which will complicate almost any proposed solutions for water security. It makes flooding worse, which is a problem even in developed parts of the world: the devastating flood in Calgary, Alberta, in 2013 flooded the homes of the rich more than of the poor — the rich had chosen the “desirable” locations along the river.19 It does cause sea levels to rise, and that is going to make everything worse. Perhaps some places will benefit. Perhaps we will be able to grow pinot noir grapes in northern Canada, fresh ginger in Nova Scotia. But it seems idiotic to count on it.