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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'."
Or at least the development, farming, clear cutting in those areas has caused it. Places where they measure temperature and rainfall the most are areas that are developed the most. The real question here is are these really long term changes or just natural fluctuations. 5, 30, 100 years are not long term in the scheme of things here.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I think salinity has a huge deal to do with it. Salinity kills everything around, making dry, arid country, the heat from the sun during the day builds up in the ground, and gets released at night, obviously if there is a hot updraft, it prevents rain or clouds from forming. If it gets hot enough (As it does where I am) the updraft actually pushes the clouds aside, and the precipitation falls over places of less thermal value, i.e. the sea.
By the way - if somebody knows what I'm talking about and has a good link to the material, I'd love to see it. Telling people about the TV show I saw that one time gets old.
Google the following:
Thermohaline Circulation
Younger Dryas
Lake Agassiz
If deep convection in the Labrador/Greenland sea ceases, the Gulf Stream will cease and England will get mighty chilly. Roughly speaking, if you don't have cold, salty water sinking downward in this region, no surface currents will move to fill the void (kind of like plugging the drain in the bathtub).
As the northern hemisphere began coming out of the last glacial maximum about 13,000 years ago, it abruptly became colder again - slammed back into the cold regime. A leading hypothesis as to why this occurred is that a lot of ice was melting in modern-day Canada the northern US and forming a large lake (Lake Agassiz). Suddenly, the dam broke (probalby down the St. Lawrence) and a gazillion gallons of fresh water was spilled into the North Atlantic, creating a freshwater "lid" which kept the surface waters from getting dense enough to convect downward like they do sporadically today.
I did some post-doc modeling research on deep convection in the Greenland Sea. Neat stuff. There are only a very few places where this sinking occurs in the ocean, and without it the climate of the world would be much different.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?