地球温暖化が米国西海岸に水不足を招く

Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country's fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack -- the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water -- seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government's pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. "There's a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster," Chu said, "and that's in the best scenario."

　風が吹けば、桶屋が･･･ではないが、地球温暖化の影響は回り回って何にダメージを与えるのか。海面の上昇よりも水不足を深刻化させるかもしれないという説があるのだそうだ。実際、米国では水不足が問題になり始めている。このニューヨークタイムズの写真の中にもなかなか刺激的なモノがある。中国では急速な経済成長に水の供給が追いつかないという話もある。経済成長と温暖化、水資源問題は、これからの政治・経済的なテーマになるのかもしれない。