Raining on Humanity's Parade

The Atlantic

For each degree Celsius of warming the atmosphere is able to hold 6 percent more water. For a planet that’s expected to warm by 4 degrees by the end of the century, that means a transition to a profoundly different climate.

“Rainfall extremes have increased in intensity I think at every latitude in the northern hemisphere,” says Massachusetts Institute of Technology climate scientist Paul O’Gorman.

In 2012, a study led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory oceanographer Paul Durack found that the global water cycle was actually speeding up at twice the rate predicted by climate models, likely intensifying by 16 to 24 percent by the end of the century.

See, we knew that climate models were pretty useless, missing factors of two and all!

In the meantime, someone on dailykos points out: Houston, Mumbai, Ontario, Macau, Niger, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Ireland, Sierra Leone...All Flooded

Returning to the Atlantic:

The African Humid Period brought rains to the Sahara, perhaps the result of more sunlight in the northern hemisphere as the Earth carried on its celestial wobble. Today, by warming the northern hemisphere faster than the southern hemisphere, humans may well again bring more water to this, the world’s largest desert, greening its wastes once more. If so, and perhaps quite unexpectedly, the hurricanes that hit our shores a hemisphere away could become more frequent and intense. A verdant Sahara, by reducing the amount of dust wafting out over the ocean, will allow the sun to beat down on the Atlantic more intensely, forging more powerful cyclones. The idea that shifting rains might turn deserts in Africa to green, spurring more intense hurricanes that will eventually hit North America, illuminates the Rube Goldberg connections of the climate system, and proves there may be more than a few surprises in store as the world changes.