HI
I am just curious that many papers projecting the future climate or their impact on water resources have selected a time period for mid (2050-2070) or end century (2070-2100) leaving behind the near future (2020-2040)
You can read at my https://www.ecoseeds.com/cool2.html it will be wetter in areas that have been dry for thousands of years, like the Arabian Peninsula. And the continued grazing of desert areas will create more atmospheric dust to enlarge and strengthen the Pakistan-Arabia Dust Cloud, that will stall the monsoon rains over India and Pakistan like it did this summer, see my work at Article The Dust Cloud that eats Cyclones and Causes Droughts and Floods
andData Pakistan:India 2012 July-August drought and floods caused by...
andData 2011 Pakistan floods caused by dust and the lack of atmospheric dust
andData Pakistan-India 2012 September drought and floods caused by t...
andData Pakistan-Arabia Dust Cloud battles with Cyclone Gonu, and Go...
and Raw Data Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea cyclone interactions with the A...
and Data India June 2013 floods caused by the Dust Cloud
and Data Dust Cloud vs Cyclone Gonu updated
for example.
The new plan decided by Pakistan and India plus 22 other countries, is to join the Saudis in the "Middle East Green Initiative" and start planting 50 BILLION trees. You can see a lot of YouTube videos about the Saudis with their "Saudi Green Initiative" adopting my ecological restoration proposal in 2010 at https://www.ecoseeds.com/cool.html -- and last year started planting one million trees per week. Then at COP27 24 countries came together, including Pakistan and India to join the tree planting fun.
What is missing, that your university could research, is what native grasses and native wildflowers need to be planted underneath all of those billions of trees in each of these countries? Could be a life-long project for many students to begin right now.
Hi Sunnera,
The main reason is that even though we call it "rapid climate change," it's not *that* rapid. When you look at the near-term projections for change, they will always be relatively small. In experiments, one is usually interested in the statistical power of the experimental design. There is a power relationship between the effect size you want to detect and the sample size you need to detect it. Small treatment strength usually implies a small effect size, and then you need a large sample size to detect the effects (if there are any). One way to increase power is to increase the strength of the treatment. For example, suppose you wanted to know the health effects of smoking. You could compare the health differences between non-smokers and occasional smokers (a few cigarettes a week, say), or you could compare non-smokers to heavy smokers (several packs per day, say). In the former, you would need a very large sample size to detect the effects of smoking. In the latter, you would need a much smaller sample size. The same thing happens with climate change. If you look only at the near-term future, the strength of change is much smaller than if you look at the long-term changes, where the difference is much stronger. Stronger change = stronger treatment effect = smaller sample size needed to detect the effects. Additionally, if you don't find an effect of the larger, longer-term changes, you will not likely find an effect of the smaller, near-term changes.
Kind regards,
Jonathan
Because of the conversion of the tropical forests in SE Asia to palm oil plantations since the early 1970s is a huge impact on the USA West Coat's future climate, as our California rainclouds originate from those forests, so our rainfall season which only lasts from October to May has been blinking on an off since then. This is a perfect "butterfly effect" where chopping down trees in one place, stops the rainfall or causes floods thousands of miles downwind. Likewise, the grazing of the desert grasses in Arabia, can cause a dust cloud that can stall a Category 5 cyclone and cause a flood in Pakistan like this summer. Global Warming is going to be a constant background effect, but these local removals of native vegetation will be a much more severe impact of future weather patterns.
Because our species is going through these tropical forests like a mass of termites, and we are grazing marginal lands to create atmospheric dust, those two activities and their increases year to year are wild cards that will keep us from accurately projecting too far into the future.
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