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Climate Change Doubles Drought Stricken Area
Cally writes "The National Atmospheric Research Center has published research showing that the percentage of Earth's land area stricken by serious drought more than doubled from the 1970s to the early 2000s, and attributing this to global climate change. Interestingly, the lead author comments that 'droughts and floods are extreme climate events that are likely to change more rapidly than the average climate'."
I don't know about most places but my part of West Texas went from 9 inches or rain in 2003, to more that 53 inches of rain in 2004. Thats the most rain that my county has seen since it was settled in the early 1900's.
Tim
The term global warming was coined to describe the phenomenon of the entire weather system heating up, not the lack of snow in New Jersey. When the atmosphere heats up, it has more energy. That means increased activity, such as droughts, hurricanes and yes, snowstorms.
Also, there has been a good bit of discussion that it's possible that the melting of the ice on the polar ice caps is diluting the salt of the oceans, causing the Gulf Stream to change course. That would have the effect of reducing the temperature in the Northeastern United States and Great Brittan. It might just get colder!
jdbear
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
Actually, a lot of it has to do with re-directing water from rivers and such. A city which resides at the origin of a river continues requiring more and more water for various applications (including drinking, irrigation, and industry), and the throughput of the water lessens down the river. Irrigation is one of the leading causes of river dry-ups (along with glacier size shrinkage).
I came, I saw, She conquered.
There is a third way to produce droughts: 3. faster evaporation (due to higher air temperatures over land).
Most of Australia cares - apart from some good rainfall in December we've been in a state of drought for the last few years.
With dams at 30% capacity and falling, there's a very real possibility of having no drinking water in the next year or two.
Here in Canberra we used to weather droughts pretty well, having a catchment area in the nearby ranges that tended to get a lot more rainfall than the areas they service, but lately that hasn't been true, and along with bushfires rendering the majority of the remaining water undrinkable for a year or so it's a serious issue.
Increased temperature causes increased evaporation from the soil. So the soil is, on average, drier.
There's a strong scientific consensus that you're wrong. Of course, since you're a member of the rich world maybe you're not *dead* wrong. But articles like these suggest a lot of folks are gonna die due to pigheaded-do nothing attitudes like yours.
Purposely setting the US up as the fall guy on global warming may look pretty amazingly stupid in just a decade or two. All those WWII era Germans and Arab terrorists that are the stock embodiment of evil today? I'm not looking forward to it changing to a fat American in a Humvee. (Some of my best friends are overweight and many of them like to travel.) Fair? Of course not. But the price of stupidity rarely is just...
Of course the scientists know that it's always changing - no one has said that they think that it should not change. That is merely your assumption, stated from a blissfull ignorance of the topic.
The trick here is to separate the anthropogenic from the external influences. That's what this is all about.
Crichton's book is a bad joke that has been thoroughly debunked.
Any time any radiation travels through the air, a certain fraction will get absorbed. This means that all that newly-reflected energy will result in the air becoming much warmer than it would otherwise have done.
This does not mitigate the effects of pollution, but rather augments it. You see, in and of themselves, oxygen and nitrogen air molecules don't absorb a whole lot. Some, but not that much. Nitrous oxide, Sulpher dioxide, Ozone... These aren't so transparent to heat, so the more you have of them, the more the air is going to get warmed up.
Areas that suffer smog often suffer, as a direct result, temperature inversions. These, too, will likely be on the increase.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I have not seen the show, but I have read about what you are talking about. A current theory is that Lake Agassiz, a 'super great lake', catastrophically drained into the upper Atlantic causing a shift in salinity, thus a shift in the temperature current flow, thus a shift in climate. Ref: http://scienceweek.com/2003/sw030627.htm
All this talk about historic climate change is like an ant talking about the nature of an elephant. We are too small, and the details are too big. To hear environmentalists talk about it, we are on the verge of disaster, but to hear geologists talk about it, we are just barely coming out of the last ice age. From a geological standpoint, everything I have read about says that our planet should be about 10 degrees warmer than what it is today. We're coming out of 'abnormal' climtes, and apparently inching back toward 'normal'. A google on "cenozoic ice age" will be instructive, as is this page: http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/ "During most of the last 1 billion years the globe had no permanent ice." North and south pole ice is an anomaly.
Not according to this page: Present-day carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from subaerial and submarine volcanoes are uncertain at the present time. Gerlach (1991) estimated a total global release of 3-4 x 10E12 mol/yr from volcanoes. This is a conservative estimate. Man-made (anthropogenic) CO2 emissions overwhelm this estimate by at least 150 times.
It is amazing that folks will repeat a claim without taking 5 minutes on Google to see if it is true.
Right. Then read Jurassic Park to learn the facts about resurrecting dinosaurs... The guy is a novellist. He's manufacturing controversy to promote his book. I saw him on some TV "news" show doing this, got him half an hour of free primetime publicity.
I could find you a plethora of references to prove cigarettes had no cancer risk, that sugar was good for you, etc, sponsored in the same way as those studies cited by oil companies to "prove" that global warming is a myth.
I don't know if global warming exists, and, if it does I don't know what the effects will be. However, I'm a bit cynical, for the following reasons.
1. A lot of scientific theories have been very popular and well accepted for quite a while before they are disproven. Epicycles. The aether. Phlogiston. Eugenics. Cold fusion. The coming ice age in the 70's. So wide acceptance by itself doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling.
2. Having been a university professor for a while, I understand the intense conflict of interest that researchers experience. On the one hand, climatologists would like to tell the truth. On the other hand, they know beyond the shadow of a doubt that if they held a conference tomorrow and all agreed that global warming wasn't happening, their lives and the lives of their families would all change for the worse. They would lose funding and graduate students, their salaries would drop, they'd have more trouble publishing papers, they'd have to teach more undergraduate classes, some would not get tenure, etc. So there is a huge incentive to interpret ambiguous data in such a way as to keep the global warming in the news.
3. The data is very noisy and ambiguous. Climatologists are trying to pull a trend out of data that has a lot of natural variation, that has a lot of measurment error, and that is very incomplete. Also, since global warming is now the "standard" view, journal reviewers will examine papers that do not tend to support global warming a lot more carefully than papers that do support global warming. If your paper weakly supports global warming, it is much more likely to be published than a paper that weakly undermines global warming. ("Extraordinary results require extranordinary evidence.")
4. The theory keeps changing. It is not longer just warming. It's almost any change in climate at all. More hurricanes than average? Fewer hurricanes than average? The Sahara is growing? The Sahara is shrinking? The US midwest is getting drier? Getting wetter? The theory of global warming has gotten so flexible that all these scenarios are apparently consistent with it. If a theory predicts anything then it has no predictive power at all.
First of all, data shows that the average temperature of the Earth is unequivocably increasing, anyone who calls it global cooling is going to have a hard time proving that trend.
If you're curious about the "global cooling" supposition in the 70's, then you should know that this was a theoretical proposal, not really proven. For instance, in the 70's they considered only water and CO2 as greenhouse gases (knowing they warm the planet). Their concern about cooling was mainly particulate pollution (aerosols) blocking out sunlight. Now methane (which effects climate far more than CO2, though there is obviously less of it) and other gases are included, and it has been shown that, basically, the effects of current particulate matter do not outweigh the effects of current greenhouse gas emmissions. In fact, the destruction of ozone contributes to cooling, and since the banning of CFC's and the slow adjustment of the ozone layer back to previous levels, this additional cooling effect is wearing off, and the underlying trend revealed is still warming.
Furthermore, it goes without saying that climate modeling has vastly improved because of computing capability.
More about 60's and 70's cooling (in section C): FAQ
I think your login pretty much says it all about your posts.
"Do you really believe a couple billion bags of cells with delusions of intelligence can change the weather of an entire planet?"
I think you don't have to look much further than the undisputed fact that those meat sacks nearly destroyed the ozone layer with aerosol cans and Freon. Not exactly weather but its pretty much the same concept, technology induced global calamity. If we hadn't taken measures to stop it, it would have also eventually wiped us just from the ultraviolet end of the spectrum instead of the infrared.
"It changed before we existed, and will keep changing once we are gone."
Thanks for conceeding my point. I guess we can hope that once we wipe human kind off the face of the planet with a global population/climatic disaster that the earth will right itself in a hundred million years or so. I just don't think its fair that we will probably take out a whole bunch of innocent species with us.
Here is the same link I posted from the EPA/National Science Foundation posted to rebut the other ostrich in this thread. It takes balls for anyone in the EPA or NSF to still be saying this stuff publicly because their boss has made it abundantly clear his faith based approach to climatology doesn't have any room for the possibility of human induced global warming. Of course then Little George and most of the people in his administration are Born Again's and are sitting around waiting for the second coming, the rapture and to be called to sit on the right hand of Jesus. If you have that kind of an outlook on the world I guess it doesn't really matter if we may crater the Earth's climate in the next hundred years. Heck maybe a run away climate is just part of the fireworks to punctuate acting out the Book of Revelations.
@de_machina
Did you do any research on air currents?
Is the Gulf Stream responsible for Europe's mild winters?
Europe is warm because of southwesterly winds from the warm Atlantic. These winds are caused by the Rocky Mountains, which divert warm air flow to the southern U.S. and the air then flows northeast toward Europe. Cold polar air also tends to spill south across central North America.
The Crichton book gets a comprehensive and authoritative trashing over at RealClimate.org, and here, too. Good reading (Real Climate, that is, not the Crichton garbage!)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe