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[ponpo]

The Atlantic

Humans have begun an international project to move water around the world, far more ambitious than any network of aqueducts or hydroelectric dams ever constructed or conceived. The drivers of this global system are billowing vapors, which trap heat and propel the world’s water faster and farther around the globe. The first results of this project may already be seen in the outrageous rainfall totals of storms like Hurricane Harvey, or in landslides on remote mountain hillsides, and even in the changing saltiness of the oceans.

The Earth system is getting warmer. Water is evaporating faster. There’s more of it in the air. It’s moving through the system faster. As a result, the coming centuries will play out under a new atmospheric regime, one with more extreme rain, falling in patterns unfamiliar to those around which civilization has grown.

“Basically the idea is that as the climate warms there’s more energy in the atmosphere,” says Gabriel Bowen, a geochemist at the University of Utah. “That drives a more vigorous water cycle: Evaporation rates go up, precipitation rates go up—there’s just more water moving through that cycle faster and more intensely.”

For each degree Celsius of warming the atmosphere is able to hold 6 percent more water. For a planet that’s expected to warm by 4 degrees by the end of the century, that means a transition to a profoundly different climate.

We’re a long way from the ancient greenhouse of 50 million years ago, but Durack’s work implies that in the coming decades, in places where evaporation on the planet is strongest, there may be ever wilder extremes in drought and aridity. And where that water eventually falls out of the sky, episodes of unprecedented precipitation.

Eleven thousand years ago in China strong monsoon rains filled a gigantic Lake Dali and northern China greened, as documented in a recent study led by Columbia university researcher Yonaton Goldsmith. Six thousand years later the monsoon shifted hundreds of miles to the south, the rains halved, and the lake shriveled up. Ancient Chinese societies, the Hongshan and Yangshao, scattered and collapsed, while politically complex cultures in central China blossomed. The response of this monsoon to warming, one that holds the fate of Southeast Asian agriculture in the balance, is a similarly unresolved question in climate modeling. Some models show the monsoon strengthening, others show it migrating far from its familiar haunts.

Around the same time as northern China was blossoming in the early Holocene, so too was Earth’s most desolate desert. The African Humid Period brought rains to the Sahara, perhaps the result of more sunlight in the northern hemisphere as the Earth carried on its celestial wobble. Today, by warming the northern hemisphere faster than the southern hemisphere, humans may well again bring more water to this, the world’s largest desert, greening its wastes once more. If so, and perhaps quite unexpectedly, the hurricanes that hit our shores a hemisphere away could become more frequent and intense. A verdant Sahara, by reducing the amount of dust wafting out over the ocean, will allow the sun to beat down on the Atlantic more intensely, forging more powerful cyclones. The idea that shifting rains might turn deserts in Africa to green, spurring more intense hurricanes that will eventually hit North America, illuminates the Rube Goldberg connections of the climate system, and proves there may be more than a few surprises in store as the world changes.

All of this would seem to indicate that we’re headed toward a largely more arid world but also one with far more water vapor in the air for the occasional devastating storm to sweep up, bringing unprecedented bursts of floodwaters. And in parts of the tropics perhaps a coming deluge unlike any witnessed by humanity.

“The worst-case scenario is that we see Harveys happen not once in a lifetime but routinely every summer in multiple places, and it’s exacerbated by the fact that sea level is rising rapidly,” says Bowen. “And then we see many of the agricultural areas of the world—sunny places with marginal water availability—become dust bowls.”

More @ linky.

Interesting to see how everything is connected. I liked this part:

A verdant Sahara, by reducing the amount of dust wafting out over the ocean, will allow the sun to beat down on the Atlantic more intensely, forging more powerful cyclones. The idea that shifting rains might turn deserts in Africa to green, spurring more intense hurricanes that will eventually hit North America, illuminates the Rube Goldberg connections of the climate system, and proves there may be more than a few surprises in store as the world changes.

Had no idea that saharan dust over the ocean had a beneficial cooling effect

 

[j_k_redtail]

I suppose the next hundred years will be interesting, at least.

 

[Sulik2]

Rapid warming is going to cause so many problems we can't even imagine.

I suppose the next hundred years will be interesting, at least.

Civilization won't make it past the next 100 years. Heck I have doubts it makes it past 50 too many pressures societal, economic and climate with humanity just as divided and selfish as ever.

 

[Pikma]

Rapid warming is going to cause so many problems we can't even imagine.



Civilization won't make it past the next 100 years. Heck I have doubts it makes it past 50 too many pressures societal, economic and climate with humanity just as divided and selfish as ever.

What? Of course it will

 

[womfalcs3]

The Arabian Peninsula was once covered with plants and forestation. There's a prophecy that it will return to that state in the future.

 

[Trojita]

Rapid warming is going to cause so many problems we can't even imagine.



Civilization won't make it past the next 100 years. Heck I have doubts it makes it past 50 too many pressures societal, economic and climate with humanity just as divided and selfish as ever.

French Revolution Guy: Civilization won't make it past the next 100 years. Heck I have doubts it makes it past 50 too many pressures societal, economic and religious with humanity just as divided and selfish as ever.

 

[Laieon]

Rapid warming is going to cause so many problems we can't even imagine.



Civilization won't make it past the next 100 years. Heck I have doubts it makes it past 50 too many pressures societal, economic and climate with humanity just as divided and selfish as ever.

I think humanity is closer than it's ever been.

 

[Cosmo Clock 21]

I suppose the next hundred years will be interesting, at least.

As the apocryphal ancient Chinese curse goes, "May you always live in interesting times."