Climate Change Poses Existential Water Risks
We often hear it said that climate change is too abstract to win the support needed to effectively combat it.
But the primary way we will experience climate change is through the water cycle – through droughts, floods, depleted rivers, shrinking reservoirs, dried-out soils, melting glaciers, loss of snowpack and overall shortages of water to grow our food and supply our cities.
If that’s not tangible enough to take action, I don’t know what is.
We’re already seeing this new world of water unfold before our eyes. And while I must add the obligatory caveat that scientists cannot prove that human-induced climate change is the causeof any single event we have witnessed (with the likely exception of the 2013-14 Australian heat waves), scientists do know – and warn – that these are the kinds of events to anticipate more of as climate change unfolds.
Last week, a new study by researchers with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Cornell and Columbia Universities warned that the U.S. Southwest and Great Plains are almost certainly in for unprecedented “mega-droughts” during this century.
Using 17 different state-of-the-art climate models, the scientists found “a coherent and robust drying response to warming.” The findings were published in the journal Science Advances.
Under scenarios of both moderate and high greenhouse gas emissions, the team concludes that these regions can expect drought periods even more severe than the driest centuries of the last millennium. It was after one of those long droughts that the Hohokam, an advanced, irrigation-based civilization that thrived for a thousand years in what is now the Phoenix area, disappeared.
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