We’re turning the West into a desert
February 22nd, 2008 by Jim JustA new article in Science (subs. req.) concludes that humans are responsible for most of the drying out of the West over the last 50 years – and warns that things are going to get worse.
Here’s the abstract:
“Observations have shown that the hydrological cycle of the western United States changed significantly over the last half of the 20th century. We present a regional, multivariable climate change detection and attribution study, using a high-resolution hydrologic model forced by global climate models, focusing on the changes that have already affected this primarily arid region with a large and growing population. The results show that up to 60% of the climate-related trends of river flow, winter air temperature, and snow pack between 1950 and 1999 are human-induced. These results are robust to perturbation of study variates and methods. They portend, in conjunction with previous work, a coming crisis in water supply for the western United States.”
The ethanol boom isn’t helping. A new article in Newsweek warns that overdrawing fossil aquifers to grow corn isn’t sustainable:
“We’re going to make the area a desert. It’s going to be uninhabitable.”