Today, less water is flowing through the world’s largest rivers, compared to 50 years ago. That’s according to Kevin Trenberth, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He explained why this decreased river flow is a problem.
Kevin Trenberth: Firstly, there’s always increasing demand for water. There’s increasing population, there’s increasing uses of water from agriculture, industry, and so on. And then we have the climate factor, which is what our study is about.
In the 2009 study, Trenberth and his colleagues identified the influence of climate change on rainfall as the main cause of river decline.
Kevin Trenberth: There’s a shift in the patterns and the nature of precipitation. In general, when precipitation occurs, it’s a bit heavier than it used to be. That means the frequency is also changing. So we get – especially in the United States – heavier rainfall with a little bit further in between events.
He said that the dry periods between these heavy rains can promote drought. Trenberth added that when and where rainfall does occur, the risk of flooding increases. He said such fluctuations can create an even drier climate, further impacting river flows.
Kevin Trenberth: In general, around the world, we found that there were decreases in important rivers like the Yellow River, the Ganges, where a lot of people live, and the Niger, in West Africa.
He added that in the southwestern U.S., the Colorado River’s water flow has declined. Trenberth said because human populations depend on these large rivers in so many ways, we need to carefully manage our water supply.
Trenberth and his co-author, Aiguo Dai, used climate models and historical records to create the data used in the study. Their study was published in 2009 in the Journal of Climate.
Kevin Trenberth: We used a detailed land surface model where we specified the precipitation and estimates of the radiation in the clouds, and the winds, and humidity, and so on, to simulate what river flow should be. And so we used that as a control to compare that with actual river flow. So we can identify precipitation as the main cause of changing rivers around the world.
Trenberth and his colleagues analyzed the water flow of the world’s 925 largest ocean-reaching rivers, finding an overall decrease in water flow. Human withdrawal of water has an impact on river flow, but the scientists believe human influence is small compared to the climate change factor.
It seems to me that any “truth” about climate science needs to be coupled with the best available science about human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth.
When the moment of ‘throwing out life preservers’ occurs, it will probably be too late for human action to do anything meaningful about the human-forced global threats that loom ominously before the human family. Time will have been wasted. We will have been fiddlin’ while Earth’s ecology was destabilizing and its resources were being recklessly dissipated. Father Greed could be seen ravaging Mother Nature. Global threats had called out to leaders for global interventions, but there were no transformational leaders (except Barack Obama) and international institutions (including the United Nations) empowered with adequate authority to promote necessary change.
At bottom, many too many leading environmentalists, politicians, economic powerbrokers and other public opinion shapers colluded in stony silence and did not speak out loudly and clearly about the colossal threat that is posed to humanity by the skyrocketing growth of human population numbers on Earth.
Despite the unfortunate, inhumane ways a “ONE CHILD PER FAMILY” policy was implemented in China, the policy could be vital for the future of humankind and life as we know it in our planetary home. The immediate, free, universal and compassionate implementation of a voluntary “one child per family” policy could decisively limit adverse, human-driven impacts on Earth’s body and its environs, and do so more powerfully than any other conceivable human intervention.
Given the visible, converging global threats to human and environmental health that were presented to the family of humanity, the humane implementation of one child per family could have been an indispensible centerpiece of a set of adequately designed, actionable programs that served to actually rescue a good enough future for the children and coming generations.
If a root cause of the global threats on humanity’s horizon, now and then, is the unbridled growth of absolute global human population numbers, our willful denial of this primary cause could make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the children to reasonably address and sensibly overcome these threats. Then the children are likely being directed down a “primrose path” to confront some unimaginable kind of ecological wreckage, the likes of which only Ozymandias has seen. When the life preservers have to be deployed, the children will not understand why the catastrophe is occurring. Because their elders refused to acknowledge the best available scientific evidence of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth and, therewith, to “diagnose” adequately certain distinctly human-induced global dangers to human wellbeing and environmental health, the children will not know what hit them, why it is happening, and what is required of them so as not to commit the same mistakes made by the elders.
This is only a guess but please note the likelihood that history will not be kind to the woefully inadequate leadership provided by my not-so-great generation of arrogant, extremely foolish and avaricious elders.
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Let me see if I get this right. We have global warming thats melting the ice caps and glaciers, so the oceans water level should go up. But the river flows are getting less, so this must mean that all rivers don’t run to the sea as the old saying goes cause the rising oceans would be running back up stream and creating quite a mess which they are not. So if it’s not raining or snowing to make the rivers flow that waters gotta be some where. Hmmm. So this leads me to the conclusion that either we are bottling too much drinking water or because all humans are, what is it 90% water?, that maybe we may have too many over weight humans holding too much water. But that can’t be right, humans are very small compared to the size of the earth. Where is all this water going? Maybe Hugo Chavez was right, we need to spend less time in the shower and enough of all that singing already. Honestly, I wish somebody would make up their minds and stop all this nonsense about water.I’m getting thirsty now. I’m gonna go have a beer.
I want to know more about the above topic. I want to know that it is cause for the earth quakes or not.
It is easily understandable why such an event in my opinion is taking place; climate change due to greenhouse effect is the cause of lowering river flow. To illustrate an example, I live in Montreal, I remember winters and summers of my childhood (now 25 yrs old); heavy snow in winter,with cold and normal summers with rain, believe me climate change is really happening winters for the past three years mild, little snow, summers cool and gray days without rain… Call me paranoid, but with all the gazes and pollutions,etc we are “falsifying” the Universe, taking it in the wrong direction; so finding out about low water in rivers does surprise me… (Good article by the way. First comment on this site.)
correction: doesn’t surprise me…lol
thanks share your artic!
In the future water will become more valuable than oil. Much more so, we definitely need to watch our water supplies and prepare early for what will eventually be a key resource.