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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday July 11 2015, @04:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the keeping-up-the-garden dept.

Heavy rainfall events setting ever new records have been increasing strikingly in the past thirty years. While before 1980, multi-decadal fluctuations in extreme rainfall events are explained by natural variability, a team of scientists detected a clear upward trend in the past few decades towards more unprecedented daily rainfall events.

They find the worldwide increase to be consistent with rising global temperatures which are caused by greenhouse-gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. Short-term torrential rains can lead to high-impact floodings.

Extreme rainfall in Pakistan 2010 caused devastating flooding which killed hundreds and lead to a cholera outbreak. Other examples of record-breaking precipitation events in the period studied include rainstorms in Texas in the US, 2010, which caused dozens of flash-floods. And no less than three so-called 'once-in-a-century' flooding events in Germany all happened in just a couple of years, starting 1997. "In all of these places, the amount of rain pouring down in one day broke local records -- and while each of these individual events has been caused by a number of different factors, we find a clear overall upward trend for these unprecedented hazards," says lead-author Jascha Lehmann.

The average increase is 12 percent globally -- but 56 percent in South East Asia

Heavy rainfall saves me money on car washes.


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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday July 11 2015, @09:23PM

    by frojack (1554) on Saturday July 11 2015, @09:23PM (#207994) Journal

    Why would that be unfortunate?

    It has been the pattern for millions of years.
    The last wet period was either 3000 years ago or 7000 years ago depending on which source you want to believe.

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday July 12 2015, @07:23AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday July 12 2015, @07:23AM (#208088) Journal

    Why would that be unfortunate?

    Because HiThere doesn't live in the southern Sahara. Otherwise he'd likely consider it fortunate.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday July 13 2015, @01:43AM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 13 2015, @01:43AM (#208295) Journal

    The Sahara *doesn't* have a moist belt below it (and North of the Equator). That was a contractual. It was actually a contractual subjunctive, but I agree that there weren't any specific markers to denote that. What's actually been happening there is the drought has been spreading southwards. I don't know the detailed reasons, but warming has made the situation worse. This isn't to say that human interventions haven't increased the problems. (E.g., Ethiopia is consuming a lot of the water that used to flow into Lake Chad.)

    FWIW, it may well be that the Sahara only became a desert (rather than a scrubland) because of overgrazing. There may, however, be problems with that explanation. Certainly overgrazing made things worse. But some of the assertions made in history texts need careful re-evaluation. Perhaps climate change would have done that on its own.

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