Sacrificing the desert to save the Earth

[bananas]

14. You really don't seem to understand what's happening: "Dust-Bowlification"

You ooh and aah over changes in arctic sea ice,
but you seem to think the desert is just staying the same.
It's not.

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/10/26/353997/nature-dust-bowlification-food-insecurity/

Nature Publishes My Piece on Dust-Bowlification and the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security

By Joe Romm on Oct 26, 2011

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The journal Nature asked me to write a Comment piece after they read one of my posts on prolonged drought and “Dust-Bowlification.”

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I do not believe that most Americans — and that includes most policymakers and the media — understand the convergence of the recent scientific literature on the extreme threat posed directly to this country of Dust-Bowlification.

During the last Dust Bowl era, hundreds of thousands of American families fled the impacted regions. Now, those same type of arid conditions could stretch all the way from Kansas to California within the next forty years.

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I used to call the confluence of these processes ‘desertification’ on my blog, ClimateProgress.org, until some readers pointed out that many deserts are high in biodiversity, which isn’t where we’re heading. ‘Dust- bowlification’ is perhaps a more accurate and vivid term, particularly for Americans — many of whom still believe that climate change will only affect far-away places in far-distant times.

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What does the future look like? Dai laid it out in a 2010 study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, “Drought under global warming: a review,” the best review and analysis on the subject I’ve seen — see the figure below (click to enlarge, “a reading of -4 or below is considered extreme drought”):

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The PDSI (Palmer Drought Severity Index) in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade

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The National Center for Atmospheric Research notes “By the end of the century, many populated areas, including parts of the United States, could face readings in the range of -8 to -10, and much of the Mediterranean could fall to -15 to -20. Such readings would be almost unprecedented.”

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For the record, the NCAR study merely models the IPCC’s “moderate” A1B scenario — atmospheric concentrations of CO2 around 520 ppm in 2050 and 700 in 2100. We’re currently on the A1F1 pathway, which would takes us to 1000 ppm by century’s end

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