drethelin comments on California Drought thread - Less Wrong
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How would global warming create water shortages? Warmer weather means stronger monsoons, according to the geological record.
Climate change is more than just warming.
The IPCC report says:
A few pages afterwards they list high confidence for climate change attributed water issues in the US West Coast.
The IPCC report is a really nice document and might be one of the best sources for understanding climate change.
FWIW, [I heard that] arid ecosystems might arise from cooler and drier climate, not only warmer and drier ones. Thus, if global warming makes Gulf Stream disappear and it leads to cooling of some areas it used to affect, they may become arid geologically soon. But I am not an expert, this is just how I imagine it could happen.
So would you find the reverse, i.e., climates becoming wetter due to global warming, equally plausible?
I think that in some parts of the world, for example Maritime Antarctica, it will plausibly grow wetter, and in others, like Europe, drier. On average.
I'm not sure, but I heard this and asked an expert I know (an economist who studies global warming) who confirmed it.
Yes, if you ask a global warming expert whether some observation confirms his theory, he'll say yes, even if yesterday he said the opposite observation confirms it.