Climate change is creating an âunprecedentedâ risk of severe drought in the Southwest and Central Plains. Rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall mean that future drought could be more extreme than any drought seen in at least the past 1,000 years and the effects could reverberate for urban dwellers and farmers across the regions.
But Alaska gets wetter. Nifty graphic at link.
| Israel manages to grow wonderful produce in the Negev desert using drip irrigation. Interplanting with Great Plains native plants with long taproots will help hold the soil, as will using no-plow planting techniques. In other words, even if there were to be this thousand-year drought with which we're being threatened, we currently have the technology to prevent the worst effects. But I speak merely from the knowledge of a little suburban housewife; no doubt the Israelis and our own clever agriculture specialists at our many wonderful ag-tech colleges can come up with a good deal more. Think of this not as a problem, but as an opportunity. |
The 1930s Dust Bowl created post-apocalyptic conditions for the Central Plains, but Lisa Graumlich, who heads the University of Washingtonâs College of the Environment, said that the severe drought that plagued the Southwest from 1100-1300, âmakes the Dust Bowl look like a picnic.â That drought occurred during what researchers have called the Medieval Climate Anomaly and contributed to widespread ecosystem shifts and the collapse of civilizations across the Southwest.
Izzat like the Medieval Warm Period, I wonder?
Yet both those droughts pale in comparison to the severity of drought projected to befall those regions -- which encompass all or part of 17 states from California to Louisiana to Minnesota -- during the latter half of the 21st century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise according to a new study published in Science Advances. Both regions are all but guaranteed to experience a severe drought that would last at least a decade, with the odds of a drought lasting multiple decades at about 80 percent. In comparison, the chances of a multidecadal drought occurring during 1950-2000 was less than 10 percent.
Our model has been carefully adjusted to accurately represent the past.
| ...but not the present, unfortunately. Which does bring into question its ability to predict the future. |
"The surprising thing to us was really how consistent the response was over these regions, nearly regardless of what model we used or what soil moisture metric we looked at.
| Golly. It sounds like the Hockey Stick program, which yielded precisely the same graph regardless what numbers were entered. |
It all showed this really, really significant drying," Benjamin Cook, a researcher at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and lead author of the study, said.
No wonder they can't afford to go to Mars.
| Prob'ly just as well. Their calculations had them aiming the rocket toward the sun, not away. |
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