Our alterations to the makeup of the earth's atmosphere are likely to be so disruptive that they could potentially threaten the sustainability of civilizations in the most adversely affected regions. Regions that could be drastically affected by repercussions like persistent droughts lasting a decade or longer.
Global Warming Boosts Chances of Civilization-Threatening Megadroughts Here And Abroad
BY Joe Romm
By taking no serious action to slash carbon pollution and put the world on a path to 2°C warming (or less), humanity is voluntarily choosing to sharply boost the chances of the worst kinds of droughts — including the kind of multi-decade megadroughts that in the past have overturned entire civilizations.
In their self-described “conservative” new study, “Assessing the risk of persistent drought using climate model simulations and paleoclimate data,” scientists have now quantified the risk of devastating, prolonged drought in the southwestern U.S. (and the world) due to global warming.
The researchers from Cornell, University of Arizona and U.S. Geological Survey conclude that “the risk of a decade-scale megadrought in the coming century [in the SW] is at least 80 percent, and may be higher than 90 percent in certain areas.”
Yes, some of the most populated and arable land in the country faces a substantial risk of a drought lasting 10 years. The risk for California has been averaged over the entire state, but most of southern California faces a risk similar to that of the rest of the Southwest.
If this does not convince us to act to address this building threat to our very civilizations, I don't know what will. Drastic wrenching changes are in store unless we make big reductions in the amount of CO2 we dumping into the Earth's atmosphere.
A new study has calculated that the chances that humans are causing global warming is 99.999%.
New study finds 99.999 percent certainty humans are causing global warming
By Philip Kokic, Mark Howden, and Steven Crimp
There is less than 1 chance in 100,000 that global average temperature over the past 60 years would have been as high without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, our new research shows.
Published in the journal Climate Risk Management today, our research is the first to quantify the probability of historical changes in global temperatures and examines the links to greenhouse gas emissions using rigorous statistical techniques.
Our new CSIRO work provides an objective assessment linking global temperature increases to human activity, which points to a close to certain probability exceeding 99.999%.
Laurence Lewis pointed out in the comments that there are questions about how applicable this study's methodology is.