I am writing this article with the hope that perhaps it might spur discussion and debate, as well as some action. I do not claim to be a great authority on this specific topic I simply share my views freely with others who may care and have means to support or refute what I have written below. If anyone knows of supporting or refuting evidence/references that should be included please send me e-mail.

As a person who has called Michigan, USA home for a 36 years now I like many have noticed that over the past 25 years our winters are becoming shorter with deep cold and heavy snow becoming something of a rarity. Hence it is with interest when one looks up the NOAA Climate of 1998 Annual Review and 1999 that we immediately observe how much the mean global temperatures have been rising in the past 20-100 years.. Now it might seem that 1 degree F wouldn't make a difference but the results are clearly observable with regards to weather. Even so there is another factor that one must include in this picture with regard to weather and I feel it is one of the most critical factors, and that is water. Where is it, how is it moving, etc. I must admit that when I began this research I initially had in mind a sole thought about water which I will explain further below. Hence the following USGS Article titled "Streamflow trends in the United States" was what I first came upon.

I will summarize the conclusions of this fairly technical article which and are nicely illustrated within it in Figure 1. In effect the river/stream flow measurement data over the past 50 years indicate that the amount of water run off when the flows are typically low is increasing dramatically. The authors of the paper try to attribute this to generally increased rainfall in the northeast. While the data indicates that at the high flow levels (larger rivers and particularly in the west) that flow rates are decreasing which is consistent with increased human consumption of the limited amount of water in the larger rivers there..

Now I have to explain why I began this research and how the idea that led me to the above lead me to other hypotheses which so far are consistent with the above data.

My origional idea came about because of the thought I had relating to the burning of fossil fuels, as well as what I believe to be a general and significant diminishment of much of the land based biomass. I must note here that much of what is in this article was precipitated by discussions with my good friends Phillip Lamoreoux, Brett Dreyfus, Jillian Sheridan, and numerous others, out of strong concern over the deforestation of virgin forests around the world - "2000 year old trees and forests will take a long time to replace". It is through these discussions that we came up with the title of this article which I call the "Earth Desertification Project". Hence I became interested in whether anyone had done estimates or plots of the Earths biomass change over the past 20, 100, 500, etc. years.. (The limited information I could find on-line indicated that we still have not found a way to determine the earths biomass because the oceans are a large unknown.)

Consider that when we burn fossil fuels that not just CO2 is released but also H2O. Also I have observed when we (at least in the united states - but this is true all over the world) as humans put virgin lands to human use we generally do the following in most circumstances:

1. Deforest huge tracts of land. Or in general reduce the lands biomass dramatically
2. Because of 1 and other human endeavors we also encourage the reduction of organic matter in the soil mostly through farming. (adding chemical fertilizers does nothing to add organic matter as I speak of it) I still have to see what kind of measurements over time have been made of depth of topsoil in the world.

Next consider the following which I offer freely to the scientific community so that perhaps we can act with more knowledge in our stewardship over the earth and all that live with her. I have only done a cursory examination of information available on the web and have not checked journals. But so far to date I have not found any references to terms like what I would define below. Though I would expect that something like them must have been defined by more knowledgable scientists..

• Water Carrying Capacity (WCC) is defined as the amount of water a volume (this can be translated into a land area as well) of soil, tree, rock, etc. can contain before subsequent water added would not be absorbed and hence run off.
• 1 inherently contains two other pieces of information related to the state of a particular volume element. The first would be the Current Water Carried (CWC) by a volume or areal element. The second would be the amount of water that can be absorbed before runoff occurs called Current Water Absorption Capacity (CWAC). Understand that these two number would change over time as the area/volume experienced drought, or wet weather. Also we know that the rates at which water can be absorbed by land vary greatly depending on the actual CWC. Very dry or land expeiencing drought may not be able to absorb water as quickly as the same land when it has more moisture hence CWAC is also a function of CWC. (These functions would have to be measured for various land types and over varying hydration conditions)

To give an example of the kind of information I'm thinking of.. Take the land in your back yard. To determine the amount of water carried one would effectively cut a slice of earth (like a 3D pie) to the center of the earth dry everything, and determine how much water there was there. The amount of water found would be the CWC (current water carried). Now to determine the WCC (Water Carrying Capacity) one would first wait until sufficient rain had fallen in your yard so that every drop of rain falling was running off your land vs. being absorbed. Then dry it as above to determine the WCC. At this point one can determine the Current Water Absorption Capacity by subtracting the Current Water Carried from the Water Carrying Capacity total..

To make it even simpler lets say you have a glass of water that can hold 2 cups before overfilling but currently holds 1/2 cup. In this case the cup WCC = 2 cups, CWC = 1/2 cup, and therefore CWAC is 1 1/2 cups.

If one extends this idea to land in the past vs. now I think it would be extremely clear in most cases of human development of land area and the nature of most our developments in any given region have:

• Decreased CWC significantly - perhaps by a factor of 2-10 in many cases.
• Decreased CWAC dramatically - perhaps by 10-100.
• Decreased WCC very significantly.

My hope is that you slowly, carefully read through what I'm proposing so the following becomes clear, and is the reason why I began my research. I also believe my hypotheses above are confirmed by the data given in the papers referred to above.

• First in times of drought if moderate amounts of rain fall the amount of runoff will be much higher than in the past because most of the vegetation and topsoil that would have readily absorbed this rainfall, not allowing it to run off, is no longer present. Hence this in conjunction with the moderately increased rainfall in the northeast explains the significant upwards trends in the low Q values in Figure 1 on the usgs page. I firmly believe but cannot prove this that if the data is put under further scrutiny that it will become clear that increased precipitation alone cannot account for this data. Hence the above is only a hypothesis but one that is consistent with a cursory examination of the data as well as the hypothesis that forms the basis of this paper
• Also consistent with the above is that at the higher than normal flow rates (when heavy floods hit an area) that in general no change is observed in the high Q values except in western states where heavy water use by populations is diminishing the high flow rates.. This makes sense because when a flood occurs in many cases the amount of precipitation is simply too great (even if the land area was in pristine condition) for the land to absorb it. What this means is that the large precipitation events havn't gotten worse in general, and is one of the conclusions of the usgs paper.. I will comment on this more later.

It is my hypothesis that because we as humans are now affecting significant portions of the terran landmass. Even though the landmasses is only 22% of the earths total area when taken in conjunction with the general warming of the planet it becomes evidently possible that we are effecting a process of landmass Desertification as well as adding significant amounts of energy to the atmosphere as heat. Now it might be the amount of energy we have released from fossil fuels, atomic exposions, etc. may be miniscule with regards to the planetary atmospheric energy cycle, vs. the effects of CO2, geothermic, etc.. I believe it is still important that we have freed up a considerable amount of water on this planet from organic matter as well as the polar caps and added it to the atmospheric cycling. Hence we have added water as well as energy to the planetary atmospheric energy cycle.

Conclusions

First with respect to total precipitation over the planet - or what I might call the action of the planetary water cycle on this planet. I would expect to total precipitation to increase as more terran biomass dissappears, as well as the average global mean temperature increases due to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. Hence storms will be more frequent, in greater intensity, accompanied by greater total precipitation. It is also it is possible that different states of the planetary weather system will be triggered in longer cycles which will create regions of drought, or flood, that will move around the world over cycles of 2-5 years, as well as increasing in frequency and intensity as we don't repair the changes that caused the situation (El Nina, Nino as a example). Another conclusion I make is that as the CWC, WCC, CAWC decrease and rainfall moves to either a flood or drought scenario, that because we have decreased the lands capability to absorb as well as hold water so will we find ironically that the land will seem dryer - hence drought conditions over much of the planet will be accentuated. Consider that both in cases of flood as well as severe drought that topsoil (carries much of the organic components of our soil) is easily washed or blown away it becomes readily apparent that we may have begun a process that will be difficult to halt once it comes into full manifestation. By the time it gets very bad it just might be too late. I can only pray that perhaps the scenario I propose above does not come to pass - either by my analysis being wrong - or by human kind voluntarily putting into practice on a individual and/or collective basis the following:

1. Any lands that are to be used for development undergo measurements to determine current as well as estimate historical WCC, CWC, CACW be made. If the owner of said land seeks to help reverse the above trends they develop in a way that keeps the same or increases any and all of these factors.
2. In conjunction with (1) above some solutions to increase WCC, CWC, CACW are things like run off ponds, dams, underground cisterns (not sure if this is right term), etc. to collect and hold runoff water.. While these solutions are a quick and dirty way to retain terran runoff I believe the key is that the mass of organic matter (matter that binds carbon as well as water) also should be at least kept the same (with respect to untouched biomass estimates) but in fact should be increased. It is with great irony that we draw up massive quantities of fossil fuels to burn while also diminishing the amount of biomass on the planet which would bind the carbon from CO2 removing CO2 from the atmosphere. If we were to be balanced in our use of fossil fuels we should make sure that the biomass on the planet is indeed absorbing this Carbon from CO2, and hence biomass should be measured to be increasing at a level consistent with our fossil fuel use. Therefore I would think that we should be increasing the amount of organic matter on the lands we use and not decreasing it. If there were any civic awards to be given it should be to owners of land that have set records for WCC, CAWC, CWC, as well as total biomass.

Discussion

It is sad that given our great scientific knowledge that we as a collective society cannot maintain the one most important resource on this planet namely water. All life on this planet is presumed to evolve from it as well as be dependant on it - yet we for some reason take the continued existance of consumable and plentiful water as a given fact vs. a tenous blessing seem ludricous. Testing has shown that everywhere on the globe the by products of our industries have contaminated to some degree all the water on the planet. Yet we still continue to dump our various and numerous wastes into the waters of the planet. More and more we are finding contamination levels in our water sources to be rising to dangerous levels across the world. Simultaneously we are systematically destroying much of the biomass that in the past served as the filters to clean the waters which pass through the planetary water cycle and which also have the capability of binding carbon released into the atmosphere as CO2 which is now confirmed to be warming the planet significantly. This carbonaceous, and living biomass is also responsible for binding and holding water in the land.

Because of increased CO2, and hence the trend to Global Warming, as well as the reduction of the terran biomass which could bind the CO2 as well as water I believe we will begin to see significant changes in the weather patterns worldwide. As I said earlier I believe these trends will become manifest in storms of greater intensity, as well as greater variation and length of flood and drought conditions across the globe. Because the land increasingly is being developed to drain vs. retain water, in conjunction with the reduction of terran biomass which binds CO2 as well as water more and more we will find water to ironically become a scarce resource even when rainfall on average increases.

The key solution which would address many of the problems brought out above is for us as a society to begin to move away from development projects which reduce biomass, and water carrying capacity but which increase it. There is no reason that we cannot apply our scientific knowledge to the design of developments that accomplish this goal and in the end if we are successful we should be able to over the next 100-250 years to create a planet that is lush with plant, animal, insect life which would ultimately benefit us all. In some sense it is possible that having a warmer earth in conjunction with greater terran biomass could by itself lead to reduced consumption of fossil fuels (due to lowered use for heating, etc.) as well as greater land productivity due to longer growing season over large portions of the planet. There is no need to have the process of farming to be detrimental to the biomass, and water carrying capacity of the land, but it should be the goal of farmers to increase the biomass and water carrying capacity of their soils and lands. If we are persistent it might even be possible to eventually make deserts ariable since the increased water circulation should eventually allow for more precipitation in desert areas near high densities of terran biomass.. But given that deserts are valid ecosystems it would be a pleasing thought to find ourselves with a lush earth debating whether we should or should not endeavor leave certian desert regions intact.

Additions