drought (Page 10)

Climate change will cause flooding in many regions of the world, as glaciers and ice sheets melt, but in the Southwestern US (the fastest growing region of the country), scientists predict a long drought ahead. It’s already happening in Australia.

In the Independent, Kathy Marks writes, “Australia has warned that it will have to switch off the water supply to the continent’s food bowl unless heavy rains break an epic drought?heralding what could be the first climate change-driven disaster to strike a developed nation.”

This may soon happen to US: in LiveScience.com, Andrea Thompson writes about a new study that shows that “human-induced change in Earth’s atmosphere will leave the American Southwest in perpetual drought for the next 90 years.”
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Due to global warming, massive fires covering half a million acres are burning in the eastern part of the Australian state of Victoria. In a desperate attempt to prevent them from combining into a superfire that would rank as one of the largest conflagrations in modern history, the Australian army has been mobilized to support firefighters.
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Global warming brings flooding?and droughts. It all depends on where you live. The Western U.S. and the West Coast will continue to have droughts, due to lack of snow melt and a drop in rainfall. Meanwhile, massive flooding is predicted for the U.K. And now we know that the ocean rises higher on the coasts than it does in the “middle,” making things even worse.
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Using computer modeling, NASA has determined that the devastating Dust Bowl in the American Southwest during the 1930s, which helped to set off the Great Depression, was caused by some of the same forces that are driving global warming today.

NASA’s computer model shows that a combination of colder-than-normal water in the tropical Pacific and warmer tropical Atlantic temperatures combined to create the drought conditions. This means that, despite improved farming techniques, it could happen again. NASA’s Siegfried Schubert says, “We know the computer matches well with what’s gone on the past few decades, but we want to test it against other well-documented events from the past, like the Dust Bowl drought, to confirm it against real-world events.”
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