The Irony of Global Warming: More Rain, Less Water

[Dover]

The Irony of Global Warming: More Rain, Less Water
By Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Managing Editor
posted: 16 November 2005
02:25 pm ET

Even though a warmer planet is expected to bring more precipitation, we humans may not be able to capture enough of it.

As the climate warms, more water will fall in the form of rain rather than snow, studies have shown. New modeling details how reservoirs will fill earlier than normal, and how snow will melt earlier in the year, altering the timing of runoff that water officials count on in many major reservoir systems.

"When you change the seasonality of how rivers flow you are essentially putting the water runoff all into spring rather than being able to draw it out through summer," says Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "Mother Nature is not going to act like a reservoir as it has in the past and when the water comes out all at once there isn't enough capacity to contain it."

Systems that can't hold an entire season of runoff all at once will be challenged to meet the demands of their water customers.

The idea that global warming will bring more rain and less snow goes back to at least 1999, when a University of California, Santa Barbara researcher said "There will be too much water at the wrong time and too little when we need it."

Water available for human use from California's Sierra Nevada mountains could be reduced by 15 to 30 percent, Barnett and his colleagues showed in a previous study. They've now applied their model to other regions....>

http://www.livescience.com/environment/051116_water_shortage.html

We should change building codes to include rainwater harvesting in every residential and commercial structure. It's not that costly or difficult.

[Dogmudgeon]

1. Drinking water isn't really the problem

It's water for industry and agriculture that the problem applies to.

The same thing goes for energy -- it's not too hard to get enough energy for residential use, but that's just a small piece of the pie, anyway. The big users are transportation and industry.

If business, industry, and agriculture suffer significant losses from climate change and energy resource depletion, the "carrying capacity" of the Earth will drop, maybe quite a bit. Since a rapidly-changing climate could reduce reliable agricultural production by 95%, this could entail famines and eventually a mass die-off.

We need to plan for these problems NOW.

--p!