Southwest may get much hotter, drier

By WASHINGTON POST
Published April 6, 2007

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WASHINGTON - Global warming will permanently change the climate of the American Southwest, making it so much hotter and drier that Dust Bowl-scale droughts will become common, a new climate report concludes. While much of the nation west of the Mississippi River is likely to get drier because of the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the greatest effect will be in the already-arid areas on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. By the end of the century, the climate researchers predict, rainfall in that region will have declined by 10 to 20 percent. The prediction of a drier Southwest was made by 16 of 19 climate computer models assembled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international scientific effort to assess the impact of global warming, which is releasing a report today.