Posted on 08/12/2012 5:20:07 PM PDT by Sub-Driver
Hundred-Year Forecast: Drought By CHRISTOPHER R. SCHWALM, CHRISTOPHER A. WILLIAMS and KEVIN SCHAEFER
BY many measurements, this summers drought is one for the record books. But so was last years drought in the South Central states. And it has been only a decade since an extreme five-year drought hit the American West. Widespread annual droughts, once a rare calamity, have become more frequent and are set to become the new normal.
Until recently, many scientists spoke of climate change mainly as a threat, sometime in the future. But it is increasingly clear that we already live in the era of human-induced climate change, with a growing frequency of weather and climate extremes like heat waves, droughts, floods and fires.
Future precipitation trends, based on climate model projections for the coming fifth assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicate that droughts of this length and severity will be commonplace through the end of the century unless human-induced carbon emissions are significantly reduced. Indeed, assuming business as usual, each of the next 80 years in the American West is expected to see less rainfall than the average of the five years of the drought that hit the region from 2000 to 2004.
That extreme drought (which we have analyzed in a new study in the journal Nature-Geoscience) had profound consequences for carbon sequestration, agricultural productivity and water resources: plants, for example, took in only half the carbon dioxide they do normally, thanks to a drought-induced drop in photosynthesis.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
These mopes can’t tell if it’s gonna rain nest Tuesday.
These mopes can’t tell if it’s gonna rain next Tuesday.
The southern Michigan drought has broken thank God. Unfortunately it was too little, too late.
Maybe next year.
I grew up in the west. There were several memorable droughts during my childhood. I also remember reading in Time or Newsweek that all of North Ameica was going to become Artic like - covered with snow and ice.
Seeing how that turned out colors my view of the whole climate change crowd. Someone should explain to them about cylical weather patterns - using very small words, lots of pictures and brightly colored easy to understand graphs.
So the Democrat house organ has taken to politicizing the weather
I’m going to start stockpiling life jackets, rafts, small watercraft, and umbrellas.
Saw the lede.
Went to the link without really looking.
Saw NYT...immediately left...nothing even resembling real science at the NYT.
I better drag my boat up here by the house and tie it to the tree next to my bedroom winder.
“Someone should explain to them...”
Facts wouldn’t mean diddly-squat. Their pea-brains are already so deeply-invested in AlGoreBullshit, it would only enrage them more. They’ve almost fully-infected the upcoming generation with it, now, and that’s going to be impossible to undo anytime soon.
This is not the first La Nina we have ever experienced and it will not be the last, but the New York Times never passes up an opportunity for demagoguery.
I challenge any of the dingbats who write these stupid "climate change" articles to tell me exactly what period of time in these last 10,000 years was "normal" in any comparative sense.
You're not a native Michigander, only southerners know the real pronunciation of the word "window".
I’m native but we have a lot of southerners in my neck of the woods. Coon huntin and all.
Danged SUVs!!
In the West, it’s my understanding it’s not so much “the new normal” as a reversion to the historical mean.
“These mopes cant tell if its gonna rain nest Tuesday.”
___
They can’t figure out which side of their a$$ goes in back in the morning.
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