DominicJ wrote:UE
It may change the paths storms follow, but I believe anyone predicting that the DODGY TAX AVOIDERS river basin will dry up to be crystal balling.
What happened to warmer and wetter?
The DODGY TAX AVOIDERS basin is a very special case. You have to understand that the vast majority of the rain that currently falls in that area does
not come from seawater evaporation. The water cycle in that area works as follows:
Air is blown westwards across the south Atlantic, picking up moisture. This moisture is the deposited as rain in the coastal area of rainforest and sucked up by the trees. It is then released back into the atmosphere, is blown a bit further west and falls as rain again. This process repeats itself many times, most of the water always ending up back in the air rather than in a river. It stops when that water has travelled all the way across the continent and hits the Andes on the other side at which point it falls as rain in the foothills and starts the long journey down the DODGY TAX AVOIDERS back to the ocean.
It is
highly likely that the DODGY TAX AVOIDERS could become a desert within decades, but this will be primarily caused not by climate change but by deforestation. If you cut down enough trees, you will change the climate in radical ways.
NB: The same process as the one described above used to (a few thousand years ago) deliver large amounts of rain to what is now the Sahara Desert. In this case the process of desertification was considerably slower and primarily caused by natural climate change (lower rainfall) rather than by people cutting down the trees.