Recent Drought in Eastern Mediterranean Was the Worst in 900 Years

[dixiegrrrrl]

A new NASA study found that a drought that ended in 2012 was the worst in nearly a millennium for a huge swath of the planet.

That sobering stat comes from a new NASA study that was released yesterday, which focused on the eastern Mediterranean Levant region: Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey. The agency found that the drought that lasted from 1998 to 2012 was the region’s driest drought in 900 years. And its cause is likely linked to human-fueled climate change.


Snip:

“The Mediterranean is one of the areas that is unanimously projected [in climate models] as going to dry in the future [due to man-made climate change]. This paper shows that the behavior during this recent drought period is different than what we see in the rest of the record.”

The fact that the huge region’s worst drought happened in a very tiny window of just 14 years out of a possible 900 is extremely worrying. Even more disturbing is that those 14 years ended just four years ago. And the scariest thing of all, the study suggests? Harsh weather due to climate change isn’t a way’s off—it’s already happening.

http://tinyurl.com/hfllxdm

[bemildred]

1. +1. nt