The Thirst Trap

For generations, Yeah, but it’s a dry heat has worked as a decent line to make people feel a little better about oppressive temperatures. But we have reached a dryness tipping point. The punchline is now the problem. In short, the schvitz has hit the fan. In the most basic terms: The world is getting hotter, a hotter atmosphere is thirstier, that makes evaporation take place at a higher rate, which makes droughts even worse, which makes things even more dry, which puts humanity in increasingly drier straits. NYT (Gift Article): It’s Not Just Poor Rains Causing Drought. The Atmosphere Is Thirstier. “‘A hotter world is a thirstier one,’ said Solomon Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford. He led a new study … which found that atmospheric thirst, a factor that fills in some of the blanks in our understanding of drought, over the last four decades has made droughts more frequent, more intense and has caused them cover larger areas.” What can I say? When it rains it pours. Except when it doesn’t.