Sarah Whitney

Mr. Ippolito

1/5/20

Current Event 12

Lambert, Jonathan. “Climate Change Is Bringing Earlier Springs, Which May Trigger Drier Summers.” Science News, 3 Jan. 2020, www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-change-bringing-earlier-springs-may-trigger-drier-summers.

Due to climate change, winters are becoming shorter, Spring is arriving early, and this causes scientists to worry that this will lead to dry summers. “But when this greening starts earlier in the calendar year, scientists worry that more moisture could be sucked from the soil than if the season starts later.” This, in turn says Lambert, could lead to more frequent and intense heat waves. One study even found that the growing season has extended by about 10 days in the Northern Hemisphere over the last 3 decades. “More green on the ground causes evapotranspiration to go up,” says Chris Huntingford, a climate modeler at the U.K. Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford, England. But it wasn’t clear if a local increase in water being pumped into the atmosphere due to evapotranspiration would be offset by rain falling back to Earth, or whether certain geographic areas might be more affected than others.” Dry soil may have serious consequences including raising air temperature and could raise maximum temperatures there by 0.07 degrees Celsius per decade.

This is extremely relevant to us as although this seems like a small issue for now, in a few years we may have incredibly intense heat waves stronger than what we’ve seen before. This could include even more destructive fires like the ones we’re seeing in Australia right now. Climate change is extremely worrisome to my generation as this is our future at risk.

This author was very clear about the study and its results however, I wish he would have gone in more depth about how exactly it was conducted and how the scientists went about determining the numbers they did.