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In one unpublished Met Office study, when the carbon cycle effects are included, future drought is even worse.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.