Most of the southwestern United States will turn into a dustbowl by 2050, triggering water wars between individual states and Mexico, according to a new environmental study released Friday. The research, which aggregated data from 19 separate computer climate models, predicted a permanent drought throughout the fast-growing Southwest by 2050, and suggested that a severe drought since 2000 may be the start of that long-term transformation. The study, published online in the journal Science, would force an adjustment to the social and economic order from Colorado to California, Richard Seager, the lead author of the study said, according to dpa. The drought research focused on changes in the Hadley cell, one of the planet's most powerful atmospheric circulation patterns, driving weather in the tropics and subtropics. Researchers said that increasing levels of greenhouse gases would prompt the Hadley cell to move more dry air over a wider expanse of the Mediterranean region, the Middle East and North America. Though all those areas would be similarly affected, the study examined only the effect on North America in a swath reaching from Kansas to California and covering the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, Utah and Colorado and south into Mexico. Testing a "middle of the road" scenario of future carbon dioxide emissions, the computer models on average found about a 15-per-cent decline in surface moisture. Those conditions caused the infamous Dust Bowl in the Great Plains and the northern Rockies during the 1930s. "This is a situation that is going to cause water wars," Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado told the Los Angeles Times. "If there's not enough water to meet everybody's allocation, how do you divide it up?" -- SPA
