Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumSpeaking of the drought...
For some time, climatologists have been warning us that much of the West is on the verge of downshifting to a new, perilous level of aridity. Droughts like those that shaped the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and the even drier 1950s will soon be the new climatology of the region -- not passing phenomena but terrifying business-as-usual weather. Western forests already show the effects of this transformation.
In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast a temperature increase of 4ºC for the Southwest over the present century. Given a faster than expected build-up of greenhouse gases (and no effective mitigation), that number looks optimistic today. Estimates vary, but lets say our progress into the sweltering future is an increase of slightly less than 1ºC so far. That means we still have an awful long way to go. If the fires were seeing now are a taste of what the century will bring, imagine what the heat stress of a 4ºC increase will produce. And these numbers reflect mean temperatures. The ones to worry about are the extremes, the record highs of future heat waves. In the amped-up climate of the future, it is fair to think that the extremes will increase faster than the means.
More than scenery is at stake, more even than the stability of soils, ecosystems, and watersheds: the forests of the western United States account for 20% to 40% of total U.S. carbon sequestration. At some point, as western forests succumb to the ills of climate change, they will become a net releaser of atmospheric carbon, rather than one of the planets principle means of storing it.
No such equivocation attends a Goddard Institute for Space Studies appraisal of the heat wave that assaulted Texas, Oklahoma, and northeastern Mexico last summer. Their report represents a sea change in high-level climate studies in that they boldly assert a causal link between specific weather events and global warming. The Texas heat wave, like a similar one in Russia the previous year, was so hot that its probability of occurring under normal conditions (defined as those prevailing from 1951 to 1980) was approximately 0.13%. It wasnt a 100-year heat wave or even a 500-year one; it was so colossally improbable that only changes in the underlying climate could explain it.
The future has arrived. It's not as chrome-shiny as I expected, though. Bummer.
hatrack
(59,593 posts)Gregorian
(23,867 posts)It's time for an about face. And that isn't going to happen.
Denninmi
(6,581 posts)Like Summer in March 2012, or the typhoon that just hit Southern China which went from a tropical storm to a category 4 hurrican in 12 hours.
But of course, manmade climate change is all a wacky conspiracy theory made up by Al Gore and a handful of scientists to aid the United Nations in taking guns away from good God-fearin' 'Muricans. as if it were needed.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Of course it's just a portion of the weirdness that's going on in all sorts of natural and human systems right now. Eventually it all becomes too obvious and everybody starts to ask, "Hey, wait just a damn second here - what's happening to the world?" That is a very dangerous question - trying to answer it seriously may lead to Waking Up.
NickB79
(19,274 posts)And abandon much of the agriculture and infrastructure we've established there in the past century. The aquifers won't last long in this kind of climate.
The question now is, how do we go about facilitating the largest internal migration this country has ever seen without it tearing our nation apart from the economic, environmental and social strains?
phantom power
(25,966 posts)and what they would do when they got there, and where the food and water they'd need to live would come from? The southwest gets a lot of press regarding water, and rightly so, but the rest of the lower 48 are sucking pretty hard on the straw too.
NickB79
(19,274 posts)Than the rest of us.
The alternative, to just ignore the problem and let every man fend for himself (free market migration, so to speak) pretty much guarantees the collapse of the US government as we know it in our lifetimes.
phantom power
(25,966 posts)1. We're going to see a major metropolitan area lose a keystone water source in my lifetime, and 2. there won't be a plan.
I'm even more certain of 2 than 1.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)if one of the world's earliest non-African climate refugee movements was in the USA.
Lots of schadenfreude in that thought....