Climate change will be more cruel to small islands than to large ones, to the point that rising sea levels will flood countries like Kiribati or Tuvalu, which may disappear. On the other hand, extreme meteorological phenomena will punish other archipelagos made up of small islands, such as the Azores or the Canary Islands , which will be affected by extreme aridity. This is the conclusion of a study led by Professor of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Colorado Kristopher Karnauskas.
And it is that, until now, the climate forecasts did not take into account the small islands and their inhabitants, since the models handled by the experts in global warming are too wide since they must be executed on a global scale. In sum , estimates of the future of islands are based on models that work for mainland lands or large islands but not for small ones.
According to Karnauskas, those forecasts were wrong. With the climate models used so far, it is possible to predict the average temperature or the rainfall pattern that will be in 30 or 80 years from now in each of the large grids into which the globe was divided, but the rainfall pattern in the ocean it is different than on land. When studying a water balance, it is not enough to take rain into account, evaporation must be added. But the evaporation of water in the sea depends mainly on temperature, humidity and wind speed, while on land factors such as vegetation cover or orography intervene.
With the new calculations, Karnauskas and his team were able to estimate that 73% of the islands will be more arid at 205 0, which is double the forecasts made so far. That implies that 91% of the 18 million inhabitants who live on small islands will be affected. By the end of the century, the islands closest to the Equator, such as the Maldives or Hawaii, will have more rainfall, but the vast majority of islands will be drier in 2090 than today. The Chilean Robinson Crusoe and Pascua islands will have an aridity index of 1.6. The Lesser Antilles (Barbados, Martinique, Grenada) will exceed 1.4. French Polynesia, the Azores and the Canaries will be between 1.2 and 1.3. In short, they will all be drier due to less precipitation and more evaporation.
