The drought in California conti
Scientists have already found that the Southwestern United States were at great risk of experiencing a considerable megadrought during the current century. The new study has been published in the journal Science Advances.
The study was conducted by climate scientists from Columbia University Jason Smerdon and Benjamin Cook. Another scientist Toby Ault from Cornell University was the co-author of the study. They collected data from tree rings as well as other environmental records of climate from the Southwest and compared them to the projections of seventeen various climate models that viewed the soil moisture and precipitation. When they compared them all, they found that all the models had agreed that there would be mega droughts in the future, and the droughts would be far more worse than anyone has seen in one thousand years.
"We are the first to do this kind of quantitative comparison between the projections and the distant past, and the story is a bit bleak," Smerdon said in a press release. "Even when selecting for the worst megadrought-dominated period, the 21st century projections make the megadroughts seem like quaint walks through the Garden of Eden."
"My feeling is that it is a shift towards a new normal," Smerdon told Popular Science. "The statistics of drought in the future are towards a more arid state that is a consequence of these CO2 increases."
"The 21st century projections make past megadroughts seem like quaint walks through the Garden of Eden."
Smerdon said that one bright point of the study is that it predicts what would happen if greenhouse gas emissions continue their upward trend. He said,"The fact is that it's based on decisions we make in the future."
via Science - Google News http://ift.tt/1AHrEp4
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