Alarming New Water Flows Into Oceans From Global Warming

GreenTracker| Freshwater is essential to humans and our global ecosystem, but rain is falling in all the wrong places and for the wrong reasons, says Jay Famiglietti, UC Irvine Earth system science professor and principal investigator on a study examining rising ocean levels.

In total 18 percent more water fed into the world’s oceans from rivers and melting polar ice sheets in 2006 than in 1994. The people who need more rainfall and water aren’t getting it. Meanwhile, scientists fear that already water-logged geography could be more submerged in the future.

“What we’re seeing is exactly what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted — that precipitation is increasing in the tropics and the Arctic Circle with heavier, more punishing storms. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people live in semiarid regions, and those are drying up,” says Farniglietti. Read on at Science Daily.