Projected U.S. water use likely to increase as climate warms
Tuesday, January 29, 2013 - 05:30
in Earth & Climate
Despite increases in efficiency, water demand in the United States is likely to increase substantially in the future if climate continues to warm, new projections indicate. Brown et al. project future water use to 2090 based on past trends from U.S. Geological Survey water use data from 1960 to 2005 and trends in efficiency. They project U.S. water demand under climate change scenarios using three different global circulation models; they ran each model for three different global socioeconomic scenarios adapted from the scenarios used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).