Major rivers aren't drying up (or how alarmism doesn't help)
Faced with the headline , you could be forgiven for imagining that the Yangtze, the Niger and the Colarado are all in imminent danger of slowing to a trickle, their dry and dusty beds a mass of rusting shopping carts and desiccated fish corpses.
when reporting research just published in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate. But nowhere in the research itself or in the comments of its researchers is the phrase 'drying up' used to describe what is happening to our major rivers.
In fact, going back to the source we find that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) press-released it with the rather more dispassionate: . The research itself is even less thrillingly entitled:
The primary focus of the study was measuring 'run off' - the amount of water that actually reaches the sea from a river. The abstract states: 'Only about one-third of the top 200 rivers ... show statistically significant trends during 1948-2004, with the rivers having downward trends (45) out-numbering those with upward trends (19).'
Flow from the Columbia River in the US, for example, has fallen by roughly 15% since 1948, while the Mississippi has actually increased run off by 22%. But notably, 136 major rivers showed no 'significant' trend either way and none appear to be in imminent danger of 'drying up'.
It's an accepted fact that alarmism in communicating issues around climate change simply isn't helpful. It switches people off and fosters feelings of fatalism along the lines of 'what the hell, we're all going to die anyway'. Admittedly, 'Decreasing run off from minority of major rivers gives cause for concern' is a dreadful example of the headline writer's art, but it's a lot closer to the truth.
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