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We’re all hoping that the heavens open up and we’re soaked to the bone here in the Mother City, but we’re going to have to wait for that to happen.

Everyone loves to say winter is coming, but as we ‘enjoy’ another heatwave of sorts let’s look at what the next two weeks have in store.

We’re going with Seth’s tried and trusted WeatherPro app, starting with Monday next week (May 22).

Oh dear.

So it looks like we need to hedge our bets on the weekend of May 27 and 28 doing the deed, because it’s very much a dry month before then.

We did touch on the drought in the Morning Spice, but let’s check in with GroundUp’s look at some of the causes of the crisis.

They spoke to Kevin Winter, a lecturer in Environmental and Geographical Sciences at the University of Cape Town, and it makes for interesting reasons:

Since 1995 the city’s population has grown 55%, from about 2.4 million to an expected 4.3 million in 2018. Over the same period dam storage has increased by only 15%.

The Berg River Dam, which began storing water in 2007, has been Cape Town’s only significant addition to water storage infrastructure since 1995.

Then there’s a little something called climate change:

Winter explained that rainfall to the city’s catchment areas is coming later, dropping more erratically, and often missing the catchments altogether. “We have to acknowledge that carbon dioxide is finding its way into the atmosphere and has reached a new high,” he said. “This is a global system, so the bigger systems are beginning to impact us … there is no doubt that pressure and temperature are related. So disturb the temperature, you disturb the pressure and you start to see different systems operating.”

“Weather variability is suggesting two things to us. One is that the drought interval [the period between less than average rainfall years] is closing and that’s massively problematic if you can’t get a couple of good years to bring yourself back up,” Winter said. “[The other is that rainfall is] coming later. … We don’t get a sweep of cold fronts that are here for two or three days and drop the annual rainfall in nice, neat little batches. That’s no longer true.”

So who do you believe, Trump shouting “FAKE NEWS” or thousands of scientists around the world dealing with the repercussions first hand?

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – Cape Town, we really need to tighten up with our water usage because things are going to get nasty.

[source:groundup]