Over the last few hours there seem to have been no posts. I am just
checking to see if the newsgroup has gone down like some other places
I have heard of.

Here's an extract from a Scientific American podcast at:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/po...repor-08-12-19

Being the kind of kind person Lawrence likes I have posted this just
for him :-)

Castelvecchi: Yes. Wallace Broecker is from Columbia University's
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and he has traveled around the US and
the other countries to look at lakes and to study the geological
history of lakes, and the reason why he is doing this is to indirectly
predict what global warming will do to rainfall. The prevailing
wisdom, so to speak, is that with global warming, dry areas will get
drier and rainy areas will get rainier, and then there will be more
disastrous flood[s] and events like those; and what he has found
however from traveling mostly to deserts and visiting what are now dry
lakes or very small lakes in large basin[s], is that the truth may be
a little bit more complicated, and, in fact, there may have been
situations in which it went the other way around and warmer periods
corresponded to rainier—to dry areas becoming less dry and to wet
areas becoming drier.

Steve: And so that's just another wrinkle in the whole global warming–
modeling scenario?

Castelvecchi: Yes. It seems that that the more researchers look into
the local effects or regional effects of global warming, the more
complicated the picture gets. It's not simply, you're turning up the
thermostat everywhere, but there will be a lot of local variation on
the scene.

Steve: Which is that may make it more difficult to get the idea across
to the general public, if individual areas are going in different
directions but, you know, if that's the reality, that's the reality.

Castelvecchi: Very definitely. One of the general themes that people
have been sounding is that there will be winners and losers and so it
might be difficult ethically and politically to take substantial
action, because some people might be hesitant to forgo what would be
good times for them from global warming.

Steve: Right: if you own a golf course in Vermont, you are pro-global
warming. If you own a ski resort in Vermont, maybe not so much.

Cheers, Alastair.