desertification
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The two don’t mix well
This story deserves singling out because it is on an important but too-neglected subject -- the connection between energy and water.
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Australia’s great drought
The Economist has a great article on Australia's crippling drought. If this is what global warming is likely to bring Australia, we should pay attention and hopefully learn something about how best to cope.
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And their PM is still in denial
Australian Prime Minister John Howard is in a sticky, yet dry, situation.
Even though a drought has caused Australia's agricultural production to fall 25 percent in the last year, Howard may have to ban irrigation so that urban centers can have drinking water.
The targeted river basin, the Murray-Darling, is known as Australia's "food bowl" because it houses 72 percent of Australia's farm and pasture land. If insufficient rain continues through the next few weeks, this year's harvest will be devastated and cities will need to implement water usage restrictions.
Prime Minister Howard doesn't accept the connection to global warming, but scientists and farmers disagree, saying "this drought has the fingerprints of climate change all over it." In climate models, Australia is predicted to be one of the first areas seriously impacted.
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Dry As a Slightly Moist Bone
Aral Sea restoration project nets $126 million more from World Bank When is a sea not a sea? When it’s a desert. Over the last five decades, the inland Aral Sea — which straddles the border of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan — has shrunk to a fraction of its original size, thanks to Soviet policies that […]
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Why Ask Why? Try Everything Dry
American Southwest soon will face permanent drought, says study Tired of depressing climatic news? Too bad, here’s more! A new study in Science predicts that as early as 2021, global warming could create Dust Bowl-like conditions in the American Southwest. Much of the region has been severely dry since 2000, and researchers say 18 of […]
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Herd It Through the Decline
Climate change ravages land and livelihoods of Kenya’s nomadic herders As climate talks continue in Nairobi, Kenya, the world’s climate-change canaries aren’t far away. Severe floods in the country’s northern and coastal regions have killed more than 20 people and forced 60,000 to relocate over the last few weeks, and a flood-drought cycle is disrupting […]
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Heart of a Howard
Australia plagued by historic drought, not-so-responsive leadership Wondering how Australia’s doing? It’s dry as a dead dingo, thanks for asking. The “Sunburnt Country” is undergoing a severe drought — the worst in 1,000 years, according to one expert. The lack of precipitation could cut agricultural output by 20 percent, and it’s only going to get […]
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We Must, We Must, We Must Increase Our Dust
Saharan dust may decrease effect of Atlantic hurricanes Thick clouds of dust rising up from the Sahara Desert are linked to less frequent Atlantic hurricanes, says a new study in Geophysical Research Letters. Studying satellite data from 1981 to the present, American researchers noted that dust clouds were scarce in years with intense hurricane activity, […]
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Talk About the Wither
Extreme drought will spread widely over coming century, report predicts Millions of lives will be endangered by droughts affecting half of the planet’s land surface by 2100, top British climate scientists predict in a study to be published in the Journal of Hydrometeorology. And on nearly a third of the land surface, that drought could […]