Worst Drought in 1,000 Years Could Begin in Eight Years

[unhappycamper]

http://truth-out.org/news/item/14655-worse-drought-in-1000-years-could-begin-in-eight-years



Worst Drought in 1,000 Years Could Begin in Eight Years
Thursday, 21 February 2013 09:27 By Bruce Melton, Truthout | News Analysis

Beginning in just eight years, we could see permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest that are comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years. (1)

The latest research from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University published in December 2012 has some truly astounding news. The megadroughts referred to in the paper published in Nature Climate Change happened around about 900 to 1300 AD and are so extreme that they have no modern counterpart for comparison (these megadroughts will be referred to in the following as the "12th century megadrought&quot . The research was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

We have been warned for decades that we would be facing a megadrought if we did not do something about climate pollution. We did not, and now according to the projections of a new study, that is just what the future may hold. And remember, projected conditions similar to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years would be the baseline conditions. Dry periods, which we normally refer to as drought times today, would be superimposed on top of the megadrought extremeness.

~snip~

The old scenarios (40 of them) were based on a complex "storyline" involving the way our global society changed over time, what type of and how much energy we used, when and how fast we changed our land from forest to fields, how quickly population grew or did not grow, and different population growth rates in different regions. The new scenarios represent the concentrations of greenhouse gas pollutants in the atmosphere and the amount of warming they create instead of the vastly varying emissions of the old scenario storylines. (The "RCP" in the scenario's name means Representative Concentration Pathways.) The new scenarios do not represent any one future snapshot of the way our society evolves. Different evolutionary paths could result in the same greenhouse gas concentrations. The new scenarios are the simple end result of greenhouse gases emitted to our atmosphere by any number of societal evolution pathways. It's a simpler process, and it updates the old scenarios prepared in 2000 with current greenhouse gas data. It also reflects a revelation in research that because we have failed to act on climate change, the old worst-case scenario was optimistically good. (2)

[Xipe Totec]

1. So what was the source of pollution 1,000 years ago that caused the prev megadrought?

If this is a cautionary tale about climate change, based on the historical record, then the implication is that we did something t the climate 1,000 years ago to cause the megadrought.

So, what was it?