Scientists warn of looming dust bowl disaster
Pastor Dale Morgan
Scientists warn of looming dust bowl disaster*
From correspondents in Washington
April 06, 2007 09:14am
Article from: Agence France-Presse
THE "dust bowl", a Depression-era environmental disaster that drove
500,000 people from the southwestern American states, may soon return,
US scientists have warned.
The study shows that the same area is “expected to dry up notably in
this century and could become as arid as the North American dust bowl of
the 1930s,” according to the April 6 issue of Science magazine.
Scientists from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) and several universities had funding from the
National Science Foundation for the study, which used 19 computer
climate projection models.
They found that the process may already be under way.
“The recent prolonged drought (in that area) is probably the beginning
of the climate change,” the lead author of the study, climatologist
Richard Seager of Columbia University in New York, said in a statement
accompanying the study.
“This will be a challenge to the residents that depend on the cheap and
ready availability of water for industrial and agricultural economies,”
it said.
The study forms part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's
Fourth Assessment Report.
The more arid climate will be unlike any conditions that exist on record
for the area, which covers the southwest of the US and parts of northern
Mexico, the scientists said.
Unlike that area's recent droughts, which were caused by sea surface
temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean know as El Nino, they said,
“the new aridity is caused by a poleward expansion of the subtropical
dry zones.”
Earth's atmosphere has been warming since the dawn of the industrial
revolution, scientists say, because humans are releasing large amounts
of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.
These so-called greenhouse gases gather in Earth's upper atmosphere and,
while they allow the sun's rays in, do not allow their heat out, acting
much like the glass in a greenhouse.
While the greenhouse effect is necessary for life on the planet,
scientists agree that Earth's rising temperature has already begun to
melt polar ice caps and change weather.