A recent piece of research published in Science entitled ‘Abrupt sea level rise and Earth’s gradual pole shift reveal permanent hydrological regime changes in the 21st century’ by Luis Samaniego of Potsdam University, delves into the continuous circulation of water from the land to the oceans and has shown some alarming trends.
The basic circulation is well known but it requires accurate long-term records including sea level rise and terrestrial water storage including, aquifers, river flow, shrinking lakes and melting ice to understand how rising temperatures are effecting the moisture of the soil on a planet wide scale.
The research has shown a dramatic depletion of soil moisture which, in some areas, would require ten years of excessive rain to make good the loss, which is unlikely to happen.
The GRACE satellite program, which started in 2002, is a German built satellite funded and operated by NASA , is able to measure the changing mass of liquids and ice so that it can measure the reducing amount of oil in the Saudi oil fields, or the state of the Ogallala aquifer in the USA and the ice loss in Greenland.
What the research has discovered is that there has been a massive transfer of water from the land to the sea starting, most noticeably in 2000 when in two years there was a water loss of 1614 gigatonnes equivalent to 4.5 mm of sea level rise and, in an irregular pattern, this has continued. In the period 1993 to 1999 sea level was rising at 2.5 mm a year, during 2000 to 2010 the rise was averaging 3.4 mm a year, from 2010 to2021 it was 4.8 mm a year and in 2024 it reached an alarming 5.9 mm a year. Most of this came for water heat expansion and ice melting but the amount being lost from the land has alarming consequences in terms of drought and water shortages.
Water loss across the planet is not even, with places like the Central Plains of the US, the Amazon, China and central Asia suffering the worst but, surprisingly, Queensland, the West coast of India and some other areas gain water.
New Zealand is losing 192 million tonnes of topsoil each year, mostly from pastures where the land has been burnt off for sheep farming and land slips occur, and if you put that together with water loss due to heat and changes in rainfall our farmers are going to have a difficult time and we might wonder whether the planning of our reservoirs for drinking water are going to be sufficient, bearing in mind how far we are behind in our infrastructure.
Heavy rainfall and floods make good television, but drought is an insidious, long term, silent killer with failing crops, dying trees and drying rivers and lakes a steady reminder of the consequences.

CliEver since the IPCC started reporting on climate change and computer models have been forecasting the future they have consistently been wrong and the outcome has been worse than forecast.
As an example sea level rise was initially forecast to be in the range of 300mm to 900mm and now we are looking at up to 2200mm by the end of the century and that is without the collapse of the West Antarctic.
The problem has always been the lack of knowledge and the provable ramifications of change. Knowing the that Antarctic ice sheet has enough ice to raise sea levels by 60 metres means very little if it is going to take 1000 years. What we need to know is when are we going to get a sea level rise that will flood Aukland airport and cut Northland off from the rest of the country? Is it in the lifetime of our children or our grandchildren or is it sometime in the distant future?
The point we are reaching now is putting a scale to the sensitivity of the planet which can then express the outcome in time.
There are many scientists working on various aspects of climate change but Professor James Hansen, who is an atmospheric scientist, has been measuring various sudden planetary events, such as volcanoes, to measure the reaction of the planet to the sudden input of dust or water and the time it takes to recover to estimate the sensitivity of the planet.
His work on the sudden elimination from the atmosphere of sulphur by ships burning cleaner fuel is a measurable event and we have seen that sulphur has reduced from 11 million tonnes a year down to 2.5 million tonnes. The resulting measure of the suns heat to the planet from lower sulphur aerosols might be as high as 0.5 Watts per square metre, which is far higher than the current estimates of 0.05-0.15 Watts per square metre.
The current theory on the effects of the greenhouse gas CO2 is that a doubling of CO2 from 280 PPM to 560 ppm ppm ( we are currently at 427 ) would result in a temperature increase of 3C above 1880 levels while Hansen and colleagues say the increase would be 50% higher at 4.5C.
This is a very worrying scenario and there will be a lot of work done by the scientific community to prove or disprove his work.
At the moment we are due to hit an increase of 3.1C by 2100 but if the planet is 50% more sensitive than current IPCC projections then we could breach 3C by 2075 which is only 50 years away.
3C is a disastrous level of extra heat as it would mean a collapse of food production just as the worlds population is expected to reach 10 billion people. Not a good scenario.