Global Climate Change Primarily Impacting Fresh Water Supply says Climatologist
(PRWEB) December 11, 2013 -- The primary impact of global warming and climate change will be on the availability of fresh water, according to former NASA Climatologist DeWayne Cecil. This comes as bad news in a world already experiencing widespread water shortages, water wars, famine and drought. When combined with rapid population growth and urbanization, especially in coastal areas, the inevitable result will be more and more people chasing less and less available fresh water.
Cecil made the comments during a recent interview on the Sharon Kleyne Hour Power of Water® syndicated radio show on VoiceAmerica and Apple iTunes.
DeWayne Cecil, PhD, had a distinguished career as a Climatologist in academic, government and private research settings. He has been employed as a researcher for the USGS Water Resources Discipline, the NASA Earth Observation Satellite program, Director of NOAA’a Western Region Climate Services and most recently, Chief Climatologist for Global Science and Technology, Inc.
Sharon Kleyne hosts the globally syndicated Sharon Kleyne Hour Power of Water® radio show on VoiceAmerica and Apple iTunes. Kleyne also Founded Bio Logic Aqua Research, a fresh water and health research, education and product development center. Nature’s Tears® EyeMist®, the Research Center’s global signature product, provides a pure all-water mist that instantly supplements lost water in dehydrated eyes and skin caused by dry air and pollution.
Nearly every outcome of global warning and climate change, according to Cecil, puts the global supply of fresh drinking water at increased risk.
As temperatures rise, Cecil explained to Kleyne, the atmosphere is able to hold more and more water vapor. The result is increased evaporative pressure on moist surfaces such as lakes, oceans and soil – and also on skin and eyes. These places then dehydrate, or lose water, in the form of gaseous vapor, into an increasingly humid atmosphere.
Rising ocean levels as a result of melting polar ice caps, according to Cecil, will increase ground water salinity in coastal areas, further diminishing the fresh water supply for wells, drinking and agriculture.
Air pollution, Cecil and Kleyne agreed, particularly carbon aerosols, tend to attract and accumulate airborne water molecules. When water molecules attach to pollution particles, they often fall back to Earth before reaching the upper atmosphere where they would normally form clouds and become rain or snow. That’s why air pollution tends to reduce the amount of rainfall in an area.
More rain and less snow due to warming temperatures, said Cecil, decreases the snow pack in mountainous areas, resulting in less spring runoff. This impacts summer stream flow volumes and the amount of water available for reservoirs As a result, less water is available in summer for drinking, recreation and agricultures.
According to Dr. Cecil, the intensity and duration of drought events in some areas of Asia, Africa, Mexico and parts of the United States, as a result of increasingly extreme weather patterns, have been observed to increase over the past two decades.
Melting polar ice caps and glaciers as a result of rising temperatures, Cecil noted, decreases the amount of solar energy reflected back into space and increases the amount absorbed by the Earth’s surface. This further accelerates the warming process.
Kleyne noted that 1.6 billion of Earth’s seven billion inhabitants already lack access to safe and sufficient fresh water. With global warming and population growth, the situation could get much worse. Every day, according to Kleyne, 5,000 children die of dehydration and other water related causes. The crisis is increasingly widespread and the plight of the hardest hit is becoming more and more desperate.
It took three billion years for nature to perfect our life-sustaining climatic cycles, said Kleyne. The cumulative challenge for humans, according to Kleyne, is to undertake education and research, on a global scale, to empower coming generations to adapt, survive and thrive despite the dramatic acceleration of climatic change over the past few decades.
Dr. Cecil was interviewed by Sharon Kleyne on the Sharon Kleyne Hour Power of Water® radio show of November 25, 2013. The interview may be heard via podcast at http://www.VoiceAmerica.com or http://www.sharonkleynhour.com. Live shows air on Mondays at 10:00 a.m. PST.
Mikaylah Roggasch, Bio Logic Aqua Research-Rogue Media, +1 (800) 367-6478, [email protected]
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