Climate Sunday--Megadroughts and Megafloods.

As the NE US is gripped with cold, and especially the New England region is inundated with record snowfalls, I think I might like to make this Climate Sunday post short, although not especially sweet. As needs to be regularly stated, while winters will still be cold, climate change as a result of general global warming is responsible for larger amounts of moisture being retained in the atmosphere, which creates more massive storms. This phenomenon can result in megafloods. But in areas that receive less moisture altogether, the dry ground will be less receptive to even the little rain it gets, so areas such as the American Southwest will experience megadroughts.  States like California and Texas already have a pretty good idea what that kind of water scarcity might look like, and in the Northeast we need to shore up our infrastructure so it will withstand what looks like fiercer storms (a la Superstorm Sandy).

Basically, as far as climate change goes, the time for "skepticism" is over, because we are already in it.