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STATES CHRONICLE – It is an undisputable claim that climate change is going to wreak havoc on most of the planet. Aside from the ocean acidification, global warming, as well as from the fact that we’re living through the Sixth Great Extinction and through the new Anthropocene era, what will happen is exactly in the event’s name – the climate will change.
And even though teams of experts are working around the clock to come up with theories about what might come next, the situation is dire. According to a team from the University of Colorado, small islands will be short on fresh water as a direct cause of global warming, although not much else could be predicted.
Up until now, current global climate models have shown that about half of all small islands will become drier, while the other half will become wetter, all by the middle of the century. But the problem is that the new study shows the mistakes of the previous ones, proving that far more islanders might have to fear droughts.
The difference is very statistically significant, going up from 50 percent to 73 percent of all small islands. But how did such a huge mistake manage to infiltrate the results of so many global climate models? Well, there’s more than a single reason for this, but it doesn’t really offer a solution.
One of the reasons is that the global climate models used so far don’t have the best resolution possible. This means that while they have no issues measuring the amounts rainfall in blotches of land as big as New Zealand, they can’t really measure the amount of rainfall for anything smaller than that.
Another reason would be that even if better satellites were to be used to calculate the rainfall on these tiny islands, they still wouldn’t be taking note of nature’s way to regain its resources – evaporation. In fact, according to the scientist in charge, that’s along the lines of knowing how much your team scored, but having no idea how much their opponents did.
Also eliminating this issue, this time by employing a technique used by civil engineering to calculate evaporation without knowing any variables related to the land, the team finally got all the data they needed to properly calculate how many islands are going to be faced with water scarcity issues as a result of climate change.
In the study, the team also approached the subject of social justice, as aside from rising sea levels and population growth, these islands now will also face the issue of not having enough water in a couple of decades, and all for no reason of their own. Still, having this data could perhaps help plan more properly for the future.
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