What Happens When the World Dries Out

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By Tim Radford, Climate News Network


LONDON—A warmer, drier world will be bad news for those people who already live on the edge. Higher temperatures will do more than evaporate the soil moisture: they will alter the natural soil chemistry as well.

Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo of the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, in Seville, Spain, and fellow scientists report in Nature that they looked at soil samples from 224 dryland ecosystem plots in every continent except Antarctica.

Drylands matter: they account for more than 40% of the planet’s land surface and they support more than 38% of its population. Drylands add up, in the dusty language of science, to the largest “terrestrial biome” of all.

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All the calculations so far indicate that these drylands will increase in area, and become drier with time. Already 250 million people are trying to scrape an increasingly meagre living from lands which are degrading swiftly, either because they are turning to desert, or because they are overgrazed. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_happens_when_the_world_dries_out_20131102?ln

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1. War, of course...

and Canadians should be at least a little worried that they have most of the world's fresh water.

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2. The world may become wetter with increasing temperature

Increased temperatures increase the rate of evaporation from the oceans and seas. The offsets the increase in evaporation from land, and there is a lot more ocean than land.

The effect is uneven, however, and some land areas will become drier.