Climate Change Is Thrusting the World Towards a Wetter Future, Not a Dry One: Study | Weather.com - The Weather Channel
Climate Change Is Thrusting the World Towards a Wetter Future, Not a Dry One: Study | Weather.com
It seems like only yesterday when the world was engaged in a politically-fuelled and ridiculously unnecessary debate trying to prove climate change a hoax. But global warming has reached a stage where things are already beginning to feel 'not right'.
With sweltering summers and drier-than-usual monsoons already being experienced worldwide, it's natural to paint a climate change-riddled picture with barren lands and incessant heatwaves. However, a new study has pointed out that this might not accurately represent our future on Earth.
As global warming continues to sizzle the planet, extreme weather events will become more frequent, that is for certain. However, contrary to popular belief, the research adds that conditions are actually likely to take a turn for the wetter as mercuries begin to soar across landmasses.
The reason for this is twofold. As heatwaves dry the Earth out, they inadvertently also take away the capacity of soil to readily absorb water. What you're ultimately left with is a crust where rainwater runs more freely along it rather than inside it, leading to more frequent (and devastating) flooding and landslide events.
The other reason is the fact that air naturally holds more water as temperatures soar. On average, the atmosphere's capacity to hold moisture increases by 6-7% for every 1°C increase in temperature. If you recklessly feed the clouds, you are bound to have more rainy events.
The combination of these factors means that we're inching towards a planet that constantly juggles between more widespread and severe precipitation and heat events, rather than a dry-hot Earth.
As a result, South and East Asia, Australia, Central Africa and the eastern United States will ultimately receive more precipitation, while South Africa, the Amazon and parts of Europe will experience drier conditions.
India, too, is slated to witness a major increase in extremes. While the country's eastern half will juggle more wet-hot events, its western bits will suffer from an increased frequency of dry-hot conditions.
The study's authors also warn that many of the places likely to be hit hard by the wet-hot extremes are areas that are heavily populated and already prone to geological hazards such as landslides. Further, they produce much of the crops that people worldwide consume, and devastation in the world's food bowls could thus ripple into catastrophic consequences worldwide.
"If we overlook the risk of compound wet-hot extremes and fail to take sufficient early warning, the impacts on water-food-energy security would be unimaginable,” cautions Haikiang Wu, the study's lead author.
The findings of this study have been published in Earth's Future and can be accessed here.
**
For weather, science, space, and COVID-19 updates on the go, download The Weather Channel App(on Android and iOS store). It's free!
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.