too much

According to a new U.N. report, the world’s rivers had their driest year in at least three decades. Record heat and droughts in many places contributed to low levels of water in many of the world’s rivers.

The world faces problems of either too much or too little water. The warming climate has fueled both powerful storms with heavy rainfall and intense droughts around the globe.

Last year was the hottest year on record, and it’s a record that is unlikely to last long. The Mississippi River and Amazon River basins were at all-time lows. Major rivers with headwaters in the Himalayas – the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Mekong Rivers – were all unusually dry.

According to the World Meteorological Organizations State of Global Water Resources Report, nearly half of the nearly 1,000 rivers tracked around the world had below-normal levels of water. Only 17% had above-average levels. Over the past 32 years, on average only a quarter of the rivers monitored had below-normal water levels and last-year’s 45% was the largest ever.

Last year’s severe heat shrank glaciers that are a crucial source of meltwater that feeds rivers. Glaciers lost more ice last year than they have in at least 50 years.

More than half of the world’s population lives within a couple of miles of a body of fresh water. The places with the highest population densities around the world are almost all near large rivers. Rivers provide freshwater for irrigation, consumption, and transportation and are an important source of energy. Historically, they have played an important role in the development of human society. The shrinking of rivers is a big deal.

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World’s Rivers Are Driest They Have Been in Decades

Photo, posted August 22, 2023, courtesy of Radek Kucharski via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

The scientific consensus that human-generated carbon dioxide is changing the climate began to form in the 1980s.

For a long time, the changes to the climate were simply denied. After a while, as those changes became increasingly hard to ignore, the argument shifted to the changes being real but not caused by anything people are doing. The multi-trillion-dollar fossil fuel industry was strongly motivated to focus attention away from the association between carbon dioxide and climate change.

The greenhouse gas effect has been known since the 19th century. It isn’t just real; it is essential to life on earth. Without sufficient levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to trap some of the sun’s heat, the earth would be an ice planet incapable of supporting much in the way of life. But there can be too much of a good thing.

Naysayers continue to grasp at alternative explanations for the warming planet rather than the inconvenient truth. Some people try to claim that it is the release of heat from all our energy-generating activities -power plants, heaters and air conditioners, vehicles, and so on – that is warming the planet.

That issue has been studied in detail. Human activity does generate a lot of heat and, technically speaking, that heat does help warm the planet. However, the sun dumps 10,000 times more heat on the earth than all of human energy production added together. Just the normal fluctuations in solar energy are 10 times larger than everything we do put together.

What is increasingly warming the planet is not the continuing energy striking the earth; it is primarily the fact that growing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are trapping more and more of that heat and preventing it from escaping into space.

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Integrating anthropogenic heat flux with global climate models

Photo, posted August 25, 2009, courtesy of Gerald Simmons via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Rivers are drying up

According to a new U.N. report, the world’s rivers had their driest year in at least three decades. Record heat and droughts in many places contributed to low levels of water in many of the world’s rivers.

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It Really Is Greenhouse Gases | Earth Wise

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