Heat and Drought May Make U.S. Southwest 'Uninhabitable'

The latest IPCC reports factor in observations not available when the 2001 report was prepared.

A warming and drying climate across the southwestern United States could eventually make major cities in the region uninhabitable, according to some of the world’s pre-eminent climate scientists.

"With severe drought from California to Oklahoma, a broad swath of the Southwest is basically robbed of having a sustainable lifestyle," Christopher Field, of the Carnegie Institution for Science, told the U.S. Congress.

He went on to warn that major cities in the region, such as Sacramento, Calif., could soon experience heat waves for up to 100 days a year.

Other climate experts have warned over the past month that the effects of greenhouse gasses on the atmosphere in the coming decades are likely to be far stronger than those predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001.

“Today, we have to assume that the risks of negative impacts of climate change on humans and nature are larger than just a few years ago,” said Hans-Martin Fussel, one of the authors of a report updating the IPCC report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Statistics: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change