Weather

Australia has endured fires, drought, cattle loss, and much more. Its ongoing plague of mice now threatens crops. The New South Wales’ primary crop association predicts the mice could “wipe more than 1 billion Australian dollars ($775 million) from the value of the winter crop” (AP, May 28, 2021). Mice seem to be everywhere.

In northern Ethiopia, more than 350,000 are living in a food “catastrophe,” according to a UN-backed analysis that defines a food “catastrophe” as “starvation and death affecting small groups of people spread over large areas” (BBC, June 10, 2021). Since November 2020, 1.7 million people in the Tigray region of Ethiopia have been displaced by civil war.

In the year 2000, “the Western U.S. entered the beginning of what scientists call a megadrought—the second worst in 1,200 years” (CBS News, April 12, 2021). Today, 60 percent of western states in the United States are in severe, extreme, or exceptional drought—conditions that extend even into the Pacific Northwest. “Lake Powell [which provides water to California, Nevada, and Arizona] is within just a few feet of its lowest level ever observed since it was first filled....

As a country, Israel is quite small—smaller than Belgium, about half the size of Costa Rica, and roughly the same size as the state of New Jersey. But as small as it is, Israel is experiencing drastic differences in precipitation across the country (Times of Israel, April 5, 2021).