NASA: Humans Causing a Lack of Fresh Water on Earth

The wet get wetter and dry get dryer. It’s that age old story. I blame millennials. I have nothing to support this, it’s just fun to say and either makes the comments more interesting or weeds out some of you. Oh the fun we have around here. 

Seriously though apparently humans might have a larger impact on our planet’s water systems than once thought.  This is also the first time we’re seeing the availability of freshwater changing across the planet.

The study took 14 years of data from several different studies like data from the Global Precipitation Climatology Project, NASA/U.S. Geological Survey Landsat imagery, irrigation maps, and published reports of human activities related to agriculture, mining and reservoir operations. This is the kind of study you want to pay attention to people.

In a statement from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. Jay Famiglietti said:

“What we are witnessing is major hydrologic change. We see a distinctive pattern of the wetland areas of the world getting wetter – those are the high latitudes and the tropics – and the dry areas in between getting dryer. Embedded within the dry areas we see multiple hotspots resulting from groundwater depletion.”

This video released by NASA tells the tale.

According to Jay Famiglietti:

“The pattern of wet-getting-wetter, dry-getting-drier during the rest of the 21st century is predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models, but we’ll need a much longer dataset to be able to definitively say whether climate change is responsible for the emergence of any similar pattern in the GRACE data,”

So still no definitive answers that they’re willing to say but they’re saying things without really saying them here. Aren’t they?

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