{"id":5905,"date":"2015-02-22T10:09:28","date_gmt":"2015-02-22T15:09:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5905"},"modified":"2015-02-22T10:09:28","modified_gmt":"2015-02-22T15:09:28","slug":"climate-change-poses-existential-water-risks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5905","title":{"rendered":"Climate Change Poses Existential Water Risks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Climate Change Poses Existential Water Risks<\/a><\/h3>\n

We often hear it said that climate change is too abstract to win the support needed to effectively combat it.<\/p>\n

But the primary way we will experience climate change is through the water cycle \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

If that\u2019s not tangible enough to take action, I don\u2019t know what is.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re already seeing this new world of water unfold before our eyes. And while I must add the obligatory caveat that scientists cannot\u00a0prove<\/em>\u00a0that human-induced climate change is the\u00a0cause<\/em>of any single event we have witnessed (with\u00a0the likely exception<\/a>\u00a0of the 2013-14 Australian heat waves), scientists do know \u2013 and warn \u2013 that these are the kinds of events to anticipate more of as climate change unfolds.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Last week, a new\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0by 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 \u201cmega-droughts\u201d during this century.<\/p>\n

Using 17 different state-of-the-art climate models, the scientists found \u201ca coherent and robust drying response to warming.\u201d The findings were published in the journal\u00a0Science Advances.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u00a0the Hohokam<\/a>, an advanced, irrigation-based civilization that thrived for a thousand years in what is now the Phoenix area, disappeared.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2013 through droughts, floods, depleted rivers, shrinking reservoirs, dried-out soils, melting glaciers, loss of snowpack […]<\/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],"tags":[113,141,220,271,3699,866,3698],"class_list":["post-5905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-carbon-emissions","tag-climate-change","tag-drought","tag-environment-2","tag-irrigation","tag-water","tag-water-cycle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5905","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=5905"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5906,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5905\/revisions\/5906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}