Water Scarcity - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 107

IN HOT WATER
In 2008, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared
the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former vice president Al Gore, identified areas of the
world at risk from drought. As expected, the report identified parts of the developing
world, especially equatorial Asia and Africa, as especially vulnerable to prolonged arid-
ity. The 1984-85 drought in the Horn of Africa, the East African peninsula that encom-
passes Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, and Djibouti, led to 750,000 deaths. But the IPCC also
pointed to the American South and West as prime targets for increased heat and water
stress.
In 1998, according to a NASA study, losses from a severe drought and heat wave
that swept from Texas and Oklahoma eastward to the Carolinas caused some $40
billion in damage and killed two hundred people, surpassing the losses of the San Fran-
cisco earthquake in 1989, Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and the Mississippi River floods
in 1993. (NASA uses satellite data and computer models to study the causes of past
droughts, such as the 1930s Dust Bowl, to predict future weather patterns.)
Even places that have long been wet have recently become hotter and drier. In 2008,
the water in the Great Lakes dropped to levels that impeded shipping. Dredging, which
is expensive and environmentally destructive, was required to keep channels open. In
the summer of 2009, Seattle, Washington, which is reputed to be one of the wettest cities
in America, had no measurable rainfall for thirty days in a row, worrying city leaders.
Atlanta, Georgia, faced a terrible drought between 2005 and 2009, which threatened to
dry up its main reservoir, Lake Lanier. Experts fear these cases could be early warning
signs of an increasingly arid future in both dry regions, such as the Southwest, and his-
torically temperate ones, such as Georgia.
Man cannot manufacture “new” water, nor can he destroy the planet's existing supply;
when water leaves one place, in one phase (solid, liquid, gas), it simply goes elsewhere,
often in another phase: ice melts into liquid water, which evaporates into gas, and so on.
As a result, global warming will not change the amount of water in the world, but it will
change the distribution of water, which will have many consequences.
Drought, unlike other extreme shifts in weather, such as tornadoes or hurricanes,
tends to tighten its grip slowly and inexorably. Some equate it to a python's squeezing
its prey to death, and scientists refer to it as a “creeping disaster” because drought can
deepen over many years, and its effects are not felt all at once.
There is a difference between drought and climate change. Drought is a period of
months or years when a region has consistently below average precipitation. Climate