Washington – As the world warms, water – either too little or too much of it – is going to be the major problem for the United States, scientists and military experts said Monday.
It will be a domestic problem, with states clashing over controls of rivers, and a national security problem as water shortages and floods worsen conflicts and terrorism elsewhere in the world, they said.
At home, especially in the Southwest, regions will need to find new sources of drinking water, the Great Lakes will shrink, fish and other species will be left high and dry, and coastal areas will on occasion be inundated because of sea-level rises and souped-up storms, U.S. scientists said.
The scientists released a 67-page chapter on North American climate effects, which is part of an international report on climate change’s impact.
“Water at large is the central (global warming) problem for the U.S.,” Princeton University geosciences professor Michael Oppenheimer said after a news conference featuring eight American scientists who were lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s climate-effects report.
Roger Pulwarty, one of the federal government’s top drought scientists, said states such as Arizona and Colorado, which already fight over the Colorado River basin water, will step up legal skirmishes. They may look to the Great Lakes, but water availability there will shrink, he said.
Reduced snowmelt supplying water for the Sacramento Valley in California means that by 2020 there won’t be enough water “to meet the needs of the community,” Pulwarty said.
On the East Coast, rising sea levels will make storm surge “the No. 1 vulnerability for the metropolitan East Coast,” said study lead author Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA.
“One of the biggest likely areas of conflict is going to be over water,” said retired Gen. Charles F. “Chuck” Wald, former deputy commander of U.S. European Command. He pointed to the Middle East and Africa.
The military report’s co-author, former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, also pointed to sea-level-rise floods as potentially destabilizing South Asia countries of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam.
Lack of water and food in places already volatile will make those regions even more unstable and “foster the conditions for internal conflicts,” states the military report, issued by the Alexandria, Va.-based CNA Corp.
