Denial in the Desert

… Some climatologists have not hesitated to call this a “mega-drought,” even the “worst in 500 years.” Others have been more cautious, not yet sure whether the current aridity in the West has surpassed the notorious thresholds of the 1930s (the Dust Bowl in the southern Plains) or 1950s (devastating drought in the Southwest). But the debate is possibly beside the point: The most recent and authoritative research finds that the “evening redness in the West” (to invoke the portentous subtitle of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian) is not simply episodic drought but the region’s new “normal weather.”

In startling testimony before the National Research Council last December, Richard Seager, a senior geophysicist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, warned that the world’s leading climate modelers were cranking out the same result from their super-computers: “According to the models, in the Southwest a climate akin to the 1950s drought becomes the new climate within the next few years to decades.”


This extraordinary forecast–”the imminent drying of the U.S. southwest”–is a byproduct of the monumental computational effort that has been mounted by nineteen separate climate models (including the flagship outfits at Boulder, Princeton, Exeter and Hamburg) for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPPC, of course, is the supreme court of climate science, established by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization in 1988 to assess research on global warming and its impacts. Although President Bush now grudgingly accepts the IPCC warning that the Arctic is rapidly melting, he has probably not yet registered the possibility that his ranch in Crawford might someday become a sand dune.

The Nation