For now, Georgescu said, he will concentrate on regional modeling because global climate models do not yet offer enough resolution to illuminate climate trends in areas like the Sun Corridor. Conducting similar studies in multiple regions around the world could help climate modelers improve their global projections and help planners anticipate local climate shifts.

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500

6 Comments

1. 1. RSchmidt 04:44 PM 10/3/12

   Install green roofs and use rainfall and the building's grey water to irrigate them. Use a greenhouse and you can pretreat raw sewage.

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2. 2. marclevesque 06:09 PM 10/3/12

   White roofs -> Lower rainfall in urban 'regions' -> then more rainfall for farming 'regions' ?

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3. 3. dubay.denis 07:24 PM 10/3/12

   First, 4% is not much of a decrease. Second, does that decrease add to or reduce the change to rainfall caused by the initial (and continuing) urbanization? But of course the real take home lesson is the one that is the focus of the report, anything we do will have effects that cascade through the ecosystem, meaning ecologists need to be involved from the beginning to identify these unintended consequences. Would it not have been nice to identify in advance the unintended consequences of the initial urbanization?!

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4. 4. way2ec 12:57 AM 10/4/12

   Good news, this article does a great job of pointing out a variety of "unintended consequences", i.e. there is no easy fix, or ecology is complicated... bad news (at least for me) I'm losing all sense of scale. 4% decrease in rainfall, where exactly? Less heat absorption, how much less? which helps how much? And finally, relative to things like dams on the Colorado, Lake Mead, no water reaching the Gulf of Mexico, watering the golf courses in the deserts... played out against 400 ppm CO2 and rising... isn't the Sun Corridor a rather high risk 'megapolitan' area in terms of consequences of said global climate changes? Might those "unintended consequences" include people migrating to areas less impacted? What is there now is not sustainable, surely the models don't just assume more and more of the same.

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5. 5. MateiG 11:21 AM 10/4/12

   I would like to point everyone to the published journal article (it is free): http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7/3/034026
   I will address some of the excellent questions posed in the comments:
   1. The 4% decrease in rainfall is relative to the non-adaptive maximum expansion scenario. The maximum expansion scenario (relative to a baseline) lowers precipitation by 12%.
   2. All temperature and precipitation impacts are averaged over the entire state. Local impacts are greater. Figure 6, for example (viewable from the link above, to the article), displays locations where relative precipitation change is greatest. From that figure, one can see significant precipitation changes, due to Sun Corridor expansion, over higher terrain (for example, north of current Metro Phoenix).

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6. 6. alan6302 12:23 PM 10/4/12

   According to prophesy, there is a chance of a super solar storm in this time period. Dec 21 2012 seems reasonable. Such an occurrence would destroy asphalt roof, roads. 700 % for 7 days. No wonder coke is said to add flame retardants to our drinks. They are worried about our surviving a solar storm.....;)

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