Will the good news never end? New studies by climate scientists suggest that, should the current Global Warming Regime retain its hold on power, our descendants are in for some drying times:
The century of drought
One third of the planet will be desert by the year 2100, say climate experts in the most dire warning yet of the effects of global warming
By Michael McCarthy, Environmental Editor
Published: 04 October 2006Drought threatening the lives of millions will spread across half the land surface of the Earth in the coming century because of global warming, according to new predictions from Britain’s leading climate scientists.
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Extreme drought, in which agriculture is in effect impossible, will affect about a third of the planet, according to the study from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.
It is one of the most dire forecasts so far of the potential effects of rising temperatures around the world – yet it may be an underestimation, the scientists involved said yesterday. […]
“This is genuinely terrifying,” said Andrew Pendleton of Christian Aid. “It is a death sentence for many millions of people. It will mean migration off the land at levels we have not seen before, and at levels poor countries cannot cope with.” […]
The findings represent the first time that the threat of increased drought from climate change has been quantified with a supercomputer climate model such as the one operated by the Hadley Centre.
Their impact is likely to even greater because the findings may be an underestimate. The study did not include potential effects on drought from global-warming-induced changes to the Earth’s carbon cycle.
In one unpublished Met Office study, when the carbon cycle effects are included, future drought is even worse. […]
The full study – Modelling the Recent Evolution of Global Drought and Projections for the 21st Century with the Hadley Centre Climate Model – will be published later this month in The Journal of Hydrometeorology. […]
“We’re talking about 30 per cent of the world’s land surface becoming essentially uninhabitable in terms of agricultural production in the space of a few decades,” Mark Lynas, the author of High Tide, the first major account of the visible effects of global warming around the world, said. “These are parts of the world where hundreds of millions of people will no longer be able to feed themselves.”
Future generations will look back at those of us alive today with scorn and bitterness. They will be unable to fathom how we could have been so greedy, selfish, wasteful, willfully ignorant and just plain stupid. And they will consider Al Gore a prophet who cried in the wilderness, but whose message was not heeded.
Somewhere, Frank Herbert is crying.
well last week I watched a speech by Imhoff on the Senate Floor, Imhoff, who is chairman of the environmental committee, expound for endless minutes on the falsity of global warming.
I found this on another site, not about his most recent speech but the same story in any case.
A little googling on Imhoff will no doubt reveal far more.
Sorry spelling is wrong, it’s James M. Inhofe, R from Oklahoma. Here is a blurb from his web page.
Actually, Imhoff may be close to the mark as well.
When I worked in the Kansas City wastewater lab right out of grad school, there was something called an Imhoff cone that you poured wastwater into to see how much crap [that’s a technical term, LOL] would settle to the bottom in a set amount of time.
Personally, we ought to refer to Him as Jimmy Dumbkopf
Of course the only victims of this drought-induced famine will be those poor folks who have been duped (by the vast left-wing conspiracy) into believing that their stomachs are actually empty.
Interesting, Steven. I was stunned this morning to read this citation from “The Food Revolution” by John Robbins, in my PETA magazine:
Al is not our only prophet, just our most famous.
And there will be that much land to utilize as rising sea levels push back coastlines.
Will desperation rise to such a level that one country invades another for precious resources? Oh, silly me, that’s happening already.
Before we all panic, this is only one study, and involves assumptions that may not play out:
They’re assuming a moderate to high level of emissions, which is probably the point. I expect this is at least in part an attempt to turn up the volume on the alarm clock for politicians going into the next round of negotiations on climate change treaties.
The fact that they’re using the latest whiz-bang supercomputer means their results will be more precise (lower margin of error or “noise”) but it’s still only as accurate a reflection of what will happen as the assumptions that go into their models.
We may not have enough extractable oil left to get us to this scenario, and if the economy winds down as oil runs low we may not have the time or money to switch to coal liquifaction.
As oil becomes more scarce, other fuel sources become increasingly competitive. And we haven’t even begun to pick the low-hanging fruit like banning or heavily taxing incandescent bulbs to encourage replacement with the much lower energy using LED bulbs now coming into production. In 50 years, incandescent bulbs probably will be seen as quaint and energy-hogging a way of lighting a home or business as hurricane lanterns.
Also, there may be factors about to turn in our favor and buy us a window of opportunity to “do the right thing”:
There are things we don’t have a good handle on yet, both in terms of making things worse (arctic methane releases) and better: ocean bacteria (that generate dimethysulfide which then forms sulfate which triggers cloud formation) may be currently depressed due to ozone depletion; their numbers may rebound as the ozone hole “heals” during this century under the Montreal Protocols banning freons. It may also be able to fertilize the oceans in a way to specifically spur their growth. On the other hand, we have no idea how the changes in ocean pH from burning fossil fuels will affect them. We just don’t know enough about how it all works.
[But we can hazard a guess that since past high levels of CO2 in dinosaur days didn’t kill them, that at least some species will survive, fill in niches that open up in the ecosystem, and continue this function.]
Do I like the idea of fertilizing the oceans or seeding the atmosphere with sulfate? Hell no! [Not to mention that on religious grounds as a Taoist I find this mindset of ecogeoengineering about as appealing as a fundamentalist finds pederasty.] But if these scenarios play out as described here we may not have a lot of choice in the matter. The general public will demand action, and politicians will give it to them as surely as they gave us atomic missiles after WWII.
Here’s a link on the reduced solar output and cooling effects (subscription required).
The American Institute of Physics has a long discussion on solar variability and climate change here.
If you go Googling on this subject, be careful – there’s a lot of material on solar variability and climate change put out by climate change critics that gives the field a tainted reputation. Check out the source on everything before you trust it.