Every day the news brings more drought news around here. Today it’s about the trees…

Houston’s trees need help. It may not be obvious yet, but without substantial rain in the next few weeks the effects of this year’s drought may greatly reduce the area’s green canopy in five years, experts say.

Erratic weather the past three years has been tough on trees. A lesser drought in 2009 was followed by heavy rains interspersed with dry months in 2010. Drought-stricken trees also invite disease and insects that could further weaken and kill them during the next few years.

Damage from the current drought will be seen in the next five to 10 years, reducing the environmental benefit of the tree canopy — not to mention the beauty of healthy trees, he said. ~ via Millions of Houston’s trees at stake as drought continues | Houston & Texas News | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle.

When you factor in all of the damage we had in 2008 with Hurricane Ike blowing through our tree canopy, the overall health of our trees have taken a huge hit. We are seeing an unprecedented loss of pine trees in the past three years. Between the drought weakening them and the insects attacking them pines in this area are failing by the dozens and hundreds.

Yesterday Dr. Masters had a post that really spelled out our combined problems…

Nature’s fury reached new extremes in the U.S. during the spring of 2011, as a punishing series of billion-dollar disasters brought the greatest flood in recorded history to the Lower Mississippi River, an astonishingly deadly tornado season, the worst drought in Texas history, and the worst fire season in recorded history. There’s never been a spring this extreme for combined wet and dry extremes in the U.S. since record keeping began over a century ago, statistics released last week by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reveal. Their Climate Extremes Index (CEI) looks at the percentage area of the contiguous U.S. experiencing top 10% or bottom 10% monthly maximum and minimum temperatures, monthly drought, and daily precipitation. During the spring period of March, April, and May 2011, 46% of the nation had abnormally (top 10%) wet or dry conditions–the greatest such area during the 102-year period of record. On average, just 21% of the country has exceptionally wet conditions or exceptionally dry conditions during spring. In addition, heavy 1-day precipitation events–the kind that cause the worst flooding–were also at an all-time high in the spring of 2011. However, temperatures during spring 2011 were not as extreme as in several previous springs over the past 102 years, so spring 2011 ranked as the 5th most extreme spring in the past 102 years when factoring in both temperature and precipitation. ~ via Wunder Blog : Weather Underground.

If you are from Texas, every graphic in the post is enough to make you think about ordering a bunch of cement septic tanks to use for storing rainwater in for the coming decades…Follow the above link and think long and hard about what we are facing in Texas.