{"id":14438,"date":"2015-11-15T08:49:20","date_gmt":"2015-11-15T13:49:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14438"},"modified":"2015-11-15T08:49:20","modified_gmt":"2015-11-15T13:49:20","slug":"global-warming-drains-the-water-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14438","title":{"rendered":"Global warming drains the water of life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Global warming drains the water of life<\/a><\/h3>\n

\"CROP<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Melting snowpack in Turkey\u2019s\u00a0Lesser Caucasus mountains.\u00a0Image:\u00a0<\/em>Dario Martin-Benito<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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New research warns that rising temperatures are reducing the mountain snow on which billions of people in lowland areas depend for their water supply.<\/strong><\/p>\n

LONDON, 13 November, 2015<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Up to two billion people who depend on winter snow to deliver their summer water could see shortages by 2060 as upland and mountain snowpacks continue to dwindle.<\/p>\n

An estimated 300 million people could find, 45 years on, that they simply\u00a0won\u2019t have enough water for all their needs<\/a>, according to new research.<\/p>\n

Climate change driven by rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide \u2013 in turn, fed by human combustion of fossil fuels \u2013 may already be affecting global precipitation. Researchers have consistently found that much of the\u00a0world\u2019s drylands will increase<\/a>\u00a0as global average temperatures rise.<\/p>\n

But warmer temperatures increasingly also mean the water that once fell as snow, to be preserved until the summer, now falls as winter rain, and runs off directly. The snow that does fall is settling at ever higher altitudes and melting ever earlier.<\/p>\n

Reliable flow\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is bad news for agricultural communities that depend on a reliable flow of meltwater every summer.<\/p>\n

California is already in the grip of a sustained drought<\/a>, made worse by lower falls of snow.\u00a0Great tracts of Asia depend on summer meltwater<\/a>\u00a0from the Himalayan massif and the Tibetan plateau.<\/p>\n

Justin Mankin, an environmental scientist at\u00a0Columbia University\u2019s Earth Institute<\/a>\u00a0in the US, and colleagues\u00a0report in Environmental Research Letters<\/a>journal that they studied 421 drainage basins across the northern hemisphere<\/p>\n

They took account of the water used now and the patterns of population growth, and tested the impact of global warming, using computer simulations of a range of possible future patterns.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Global warming drains the water of life Melting snowpack in Turkey\u2019s\u00a0Lesser Caucasus mountains.\u00a0Image:\u00a0Dario Martin-Benito New research warns that rising temperatures are reducing the mountain snow on which billions of people in lowland areas depend for their water supply. LONDON, 13 November, 2015\u00a0\u2013 Up to two billion people who depend on winter snow to deliver their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[20,101,141,220,369,10619,866],"class_list":["post-14438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-agriculture","tag-california","tag-climate-change","tag-drought","tag-global-warming","tag-meltwater","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14438"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14439,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14438\/revisions\/14439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}