Changing rainfall common problem for entire globe, says UN-sponsored book

Siberian wildfires so intense they melted the permafrost beneaththem. Flooding in Alberta that paralyzed a major city. Toxic algaeblooms in Lake Winnipeg that have grown 1,000 per cent since 1990.

They're all linked, say the authors of a new UnitedNations-sponsored book entitled "Water, Energy and the Arab
Awakening," being released Monday.In it, 16 authors includingformer prime minister Jean Chretien argue that the world can nolonger afford to ignore the effects of climate change on rainfallpatterns and their consequences for human security.

"There's a nexus between water security, food security andenergy security," said editor Zafar Adeel. "We're beyond the pointwhere you can deal with these three areas as separate silos."

Just look at what happened in 2013, said Robert Sandford, one ofCanada's leading water scientists and one of the contributingauthors.

In June, flooding submerged downtown Calgary. Two weeks later,Toronto was hit with more rain in two hours than it usually sees in amonth.

Meanwhile, the Global Nature Fund declared Lake Winnipeg the"Threatened Lake of 2013" as longer, heavier rains have beenflushing so much runoff into it that efforts to reduce the resultingamount of fertilizers and animal waste aren't keeping up.

And in northern Siberia, an outbreak of hundreds of wildfires wasfollowed by rainfall so intense it flooded more than a millionsquare kilometres.

"Many of our recent floods were similar in a number of ways,"wrote Sandford.

Storms seem to get stuck in place instead of moving along. Theirinternal dynamics look more like tropical storms than those fromtemperate regions.

Recent research suggests declining Arctic sea ice may be behindthose effects. Although that theory remains controversial, Sandfordsaid some sort of thread runs between a warmer Arctic, a weaker jetstream and extreme weather events.

Those effects are compounded by so-called atmospheric rivers, thegreat, high-altitude air currents that carry moisture around theglobe such as the Pineapple Express that dampens North America'swest coast. As the atmosphere gets warmer, those rivers can carrymore water seven per cent more for every degree Celsius.

It was the collision of three such rivers that led to theflooding in Russia.

The changes are happening across the entire northern hemisphere,said Adeel.

"In the Arab region, we've seen a confluence of populationimpacts, social challenges, combined with water scarcity, combinedwith impacts on food security. When you have a confluence of allthese factors coming together, that's really where the explosivesituations occur."

The book proposes that a 180-kilometre pipeline bringing waterfrom the Red Sea to the Dead Sea would improve the region'senvironmental, energy and peace prospects.

"Canadians may not think this matters," said Sandford. "Itshould matter to Canadians that our hydrology's changing, but weshould also be really concerned that the hydrology of the entirenorthern hemisphere that we know is changing.

"It's going to affect the Middle East, it's going to affectplaces far from us, and that's going to have a huge impact on usalso."