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Global warming likely to trigger devastating droughts

05/Oct/2006: A new forecast by Britain’s leading climatologists, warns that devastating drought triggered by global warming could spread across half the land surface of this planet, in the coming century.

Based on a study, Met office’s Hadley Climate Centre for Climate Prediction and Research has forecasted that extreme drought will affect nearly a third of the planet, making agriculture impossible in those areas.

Scientists, who were involved in this study, said that this was one of the first direct forecasts on the dire effects of rising temperatures around the world and it could still be an underestimate of the actual situation.

The findings of this new study released at the Conservative Party Conference in Bournemouth, has drawn shocked and disappointed reactions from aid agencies and climatologists, who fear that people living in poor and developing countries, could be the worst hit by this impending disaster.

Andrew Pendleton of Christian Aid said that this forecast literally means a death sentence for millions of people living in poor countries, which would witness human migrations of proportions never witnessed before. Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation said that extreme drought could push millions of people living in poor countries, who are already struggling to get on with their daily lives, in to an abyss.

The findings of this study, has quantified for the first time, the actual threat of global warming on agriculture, using advanced supercomputer climate models.

The actual situation in future could be much worse, since the study did not take in to account the effects of greenhouse gases (methane & carbon dioxide) that are being released in to the atmosphere by dying forests, forest fires and melting permafrost. In another unpublished study carried out by the Met office, future droughts are predicted to be much worse, as it took in to account all factors associated with the carbon cycle.

This study, carried out by Dr. Eleanor Burke and two of his colleagues at Hadley Centre, used Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), a widely-used method to measure droughts. They found that PDSI figures are likely to increase in the coming century across the globe, with changes in rainfall and temperatures triggered by climate change.

The study has shown that the PDSI figure for moderate drought, currently at 25% of the Earth’s surface could increase to 50% by 2100, the PDSI figure for severe drought could go up from 8% to 40% and the figure for extreme drought might rise to 30% from its current level of 3%.

This study, which was funded by the Department for Environment and Rural Affairs, has many uncertainties, as it relied only on one climate model and one drought index.

Moreover, it has not considered the future increases in the emission of greenhouse gases. However, the results of this study are significant in today’s context, according to Dr. Vicky Pope, head of the Hadley Centre’s Climate Programme, who said that further studies would follow to reduce the uncertainties in the forecast and to uncover the potential risk of different levels of drought in different places.

K Siva

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