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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'."
it could be snowing in the middle of April in New Jersey, but it was damn hot in Brazil :/ Like 45C in my town
from the dawn of time the climate has been changing! what makes them think it shouldn't now?
Global warming produces increased precipitation.
So what's changing the wind patterns?
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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 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.
It looks like the world's climate has changed a lot. When I was a kid, the winter started around Dec 20th and lasted until late March where I live. Nowadays, in the last few years, if we had any snow it was in November, with nothing during the time when the winter was supposed to be, with perhaps another strike of snow around April. Such "two springs" years became nearly a rule lately -- with a screwed up effect on the vegetation.
:p
Ah, I'm just 26, so that "when I was a kid" is not that far ago. Such a rapid, severe change of climate is something not to be trifled with.
But hey... we have several processes that cause rapid global warming running simultaneously with processes that cause global cooling. Things just have to act weird
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
We will always be able to find a way for the data to support the theory that there is no global climate change. First of all, there is just is not enough data on record to say anything with absolute certainty.
Is this really drought, or are we returning to normal after a few good rain years?
You can also make the argument that you can't just look at areas labeled drought stricken, you have to look across the board at all the areas and counter those areas with below average precipitation with those areas that have more water than they can deal with. Why, if you include all of the water that's been washed up on shore since, say, the day after Christmas, why you would say there's been much more flooding than droughting. (I am practicing for my audition on the O'Reilly factor).
If you look at all of this a hundred years from now, would you say that these so called drought areas are experiencing drought, or would you say that the great midwestern desert, the great indo-European desert and the great Amazon plains desert are just normal and the way its always been.
BTW, one odd change. About 100 years ago, the "liberals" would have been the ones arguing that all changes are gradual in response to conservative nut cases talking great floods and cataclysmic events. Today, the conservatives seem to shut their eyes to the possibility of catastrophic changes, and the liberals are more likely to be talking about catastrophic change.
Increased temperature causes increased evaporation from the soil. So the soil is, on average, drier.
I used to think exactly that until I saw a show on the Discovery Channel about the deep sea current that flows from the North Atlantic to the SW Pacific.
Yes, my source is a TV show.
It clearly explained (in terms a CS guy could understand) how the threat of global warming is NOT rising temperatures and rising sea levels, but rather a decrease in the salinity of the North Atlantic which will disrupt the deep sea current. The result of this will be a dramatic and nearly immedate end to the moderation of climates enjoyed around the world - basically everywhere north of the Tropic of Cancer and south of the Tropic of Capricorn will experience an ice age while the equatorial region will become a desert that makes the Sahara look quaint.
I'm not prepared to argue the merits or weaknesses of such conjecture, but The Discovery channel sure as hell convinced me - to my (climatology amateur yet) analytical mind, the arguments all stacked up. The salinity situation is all but impossible to refute and the climate data culled from Antarctic glacier ice cores indicates that sudden radical shifts in Earth's climate into an ice age are nothing if not typical.
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.
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...
I was supprised that this article doesn't mention the effect of land use over climate change. One of the fastest ways the increase the local tempeture of an area is to cut down all the trees (raise by 2-3 degrees C). Remember over=grazing of the mid west led to the dust bowl during the great depression. Sadly a lot of developing nations use bad farming practaces, and that is why deserts are the only ecosystems still expanding today.
It says the central U.S. is wetter but the man made lakes in western Nebraska are toast - McConaughy is at something like 32% of full and they're going to dry up three smaller downstream lakes to keep it at least partially full next summer.
Maybe its a fifty year average and the last five have been bad
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
For the love of Pete - who modded this interesting?
"Bad thing happens. Bitch about Republicans"
Interesting? It's not even boring anymore.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Is the anti-Kyoto mob on Slashdot so desperate as to cite his latest as their scientific evidence?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Homer: Oh Lisa! There's no record of a hurricane ever hitting Springfield.
Lisa: Yes, but the records only go back to 1978 when the Hall of Records was mysteriously blown away.
The best posts are both flamebait and informative.
> I'm more inclined to believe that the shit we pump into the atmosphere, combined with the earth changing naturally, is going to cause more extremes. Not warming or cooling, but more extremes more often. More droughts, more floods, more snowstorms, more of anything but normal weather conditions.
Global warming = more thermal energy in the atmosphere. IANAPlanetologist, but I wouldn't be the least surprised to find that more thermal energy --> more meterological extremes.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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?
Yes. For there is no physical fact known to absolute certainty. None. Not one. Absolute truths are limited to geometry, mathamatics and logic. Gravity, speed of light, any idea based on measurements, all such ideas are are all subject to doubt. But I would not suggest jumping of any tall buildings. The odds are very very high that such a jumper would become a messy spot on the ground in just seconds.
Climate is a complex subject. Understanding it would be very unlikely to help you get an audition on the "O'Reilly" factor. It would be more likely to keep you off such shows. But if you did want to understand, here is the best overview I know of:
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm
About 100 years ago, the "liberals" would have been the ones arguing that all changes are gradual in response to conservative nut cases talking great floods and cataclysmic events. Today, the conservatives seem to shut their eyes to the possibility of catastrophic changes, and the liberals are more likely to be talking about catastrophic change.
The world is a lot stranger than "liberal" vs "conservative". While climate change will probably look sudden on a geological time scale, on a human scale it probably will not look catastrophic until it is catastrophic. Which is exactly too late. Isn't preventing change what "conservatives" try to do?
"Nuclear power has a series of terrible consequences that have been shown to occur."
Care to name some? France generates 3/4 of it's power with nuclear reactors and they don't seem to have any problems. Hell, in any power plant in the western world, you could have a Chernobyl-type meltdown and so what - it's called a containment dome.
"safety in the running of a plant"
You're exposed to more intense radiation in a fossil fuel plant or an airliner flight or during a sunbath than in a nuclear power plant. Fossil fuel plants spew tons of Uranium and Thorium into the atmosphere every year. If anything, a nuclear power plant is safer than a fossil fuel power plant.
As for the waste, about 95 to 98 percent of it is still good nuclear fuel that's been poisoned by fission byproducts. If greens would stop howling about "mobile Chernobyls" (How are we going to stuff a hundred million curies of radioactivity into a 100 gallon drum anyway?) and let the government reprocess the 'spent' fuel, 95 percent of the problem would disappear! Then the few cubic meters of radioactive sludge remaining could be locked into ceramics and buried forever.
"30% efficient solar cells."
Not going to bite... Go read the actual article and the comments. Hint: the device could theoretically be 30% efficient.
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.
"Venus has an atmosphere of about 95% CO2. It is physically impossible for humans to create anywhere near that level of CO2 here on Earth."
You also don't need anything close to that to devestate life on earth. If we push up the Earth's average temperature 10-20 degrees Fahrenheit that will be enough to cause a massive disruption in our climate and lives. 10 degrees is within the range currently estimated by the National Science Foundation for the next 100 years especially if we make no attempt to check green house gas production.
"Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased nearly 30%, methane concentrations have more than doubled, and nitrous oxide concentrations have risen by about 15%."
"Since 1979, scientists have generally agreed that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide increases the earth?s average surface temperature by 1.5-4.5C (3-8F). More recent studies have suggested that the warming is likely to occur more rapidly over land than the open seas."
"Global mean surface temperatures have increased 0.5-1.0F since the late 19th century. The 20th century's 10 warmest years all occurred in the last 15 years of the century. Of these, 1998 was the warmest year on record. The snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere and floating ice in the Arctic Ocean have decreased. Globally, sea level has risen 4-8 inches over the past century. Worldwide precipitation over land has increased by about one percent. The frequency of extreme rainfall events has increased throughout much of the United States." **Reference California this week.
"At first, the cooler oceans will tend to absorb much of the additional heat and thereby decrease the warming of the atmosphere. Only when the ocean comes into equilibrium with the higher level of CO2 will the full warming occur."
"The conservationist looks for the best way to solve an environmental issue taking into account as much science as is possible. The environmentalist already knows what the right way to solve an issue is and finds the science to back him up. I think this is why you got upset that I mocked your assertion that cow farts are causing global warming."
I'm sorry but your rhetoric throughout this thread shows you are anything but a conservationist and you don't give a rats ass about any of the science involved. Your approach to the science is the ostrich approach, stick your head in the sand and hope for the best. I'm giving you reference after reference, and you give me denial, tangents and empty rhetoric. A conservationist isn't going to pick fossil fuels and nukes as the only two viable energy sources for the planet.
Nuclear is an option but it comes laced with problems in particular safety, especially in an age where they are inviting terrorism targets, waste disposal and the obvious fact the U.S. wont stand for most places around the world having it due to the weapons proliferation problems. One little accident with a big nuclear plant and you poison a vast area and they simply aren't fool proof no matter how good the design.
@de_machina
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.
I saw another Discovery show that proved that global warming was a crock. That show also dispelled the myth of North American deforestation. It all made sense to me. There are lots of arugements from all different angles. Who really knows who is right. My mother gave me a book for X-mas by Michael Crichton called "State Of Fear" . I haven't had time to read it yet but my mother did over the holidays. She told me a little about it. In it she said Crichton dispelled the myths about global warming, deforestation, DDT, and much more. The book really interested her and she's pretty swift. It sounds like a book I'd recommend. Maybe I'll write a Slashdot review for it. Anyhow you might be interested in it. I can't vouch for what's in it yet but she did say he cited lots of sources. It's probably worth reading
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