With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

Dust Bowl years. In 2002, it fell to just 3 million acre-feet. In 2005, the
drought was continuing. In Central Asia, the Afghan war of 2002 was fought
against a backdrop of drought as debilitating as any Taliban tyranny. The
Hamoun wetland, which covers 1,500 square miles on the remote border
between Afghanistan and Iran, has for millennia been a place of refuge for
people from both countries in times of trouble. But that year it dried out and
turned to salt flats. The water has not returned. Southern Europe is
increasingly beset by forest fires and desiccated crops.
Richard Seager, of Lamont-Doherty, says that there is a long-standing
correlation between drought in the western U.S. and drought in South
America, parts of Europe, and Central Asia. And that is a pattern we see
reasserting itself in the twenty-first century, as the Arizona desert creeps
north, southern Europe increasingly resembles North Africa, and Central
Asia takes on the appearance of Iraq or the Arabian Peninsula. Kevin
Trenberth, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, reports that the
percentage of Earth's land area stricken by serious drought has more than
doubled in thirty years. In the 1970s, less than 15 percent of the land was
drought-stricken, but by the first years of the twenty-first century, around 30
percent was. "The climate models predict increased drying over most land
areas," he says. "Our analyses suggest that this may already have begun."
That seems to be a common view. Mark Cane, a specialist in Pacific
weather at Lamont-Doherty, says scarily: "The medieval warm period a
thousand years ago was a very small forcing compared to what is going on
with global warming now. But it was still strong enough to cause a 300-to
400-year drought in the western U.S. That could be an analogue for what
will happen under anthropogenic warming. If the mechanisms we think