In #12 we saw that soil moisture droughts – agricultural and ecological droughts – have increased globally.
I’ve been following the flow of AR6 in their discussion of recent trends. They do go on to discuss hydrological droughts without much that’s definitive so perhaps we’ll have a brief look at that in another article, as I’m something of a completionist.
But there’s something important missing from the drought section.
Are plants dying? If not, is there really an increase in soil moisture drought?
Here’s a question from Alexis Berg & Justin Sheffield (2018) to put the problem in a broader context. Here and in all the other papers quoted, bold text is my change:
The notion that a warmer climate leads to a drier land surface, i.e., increased water stress, driven overwhelming by the effect of warmer temperatures on evaporative demand, appears, however, inconsistent with paleo-evidence and vegetation reconstructions for different colder and warmer past climates.
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