{"id":14786,"date":"2023-12-08T01:47:43","date_gmt":"2023-12-08T01:47:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/social.coldstreams.com\/?p=14786"},"modified":"2024-11-18T02:55:03","modified_gmt":"2024-11-18T02:55:03","slug":"media-ap-implies-the-aral-sea-dried-up-due-to-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/2023\/12\/08\/media-ap-implies-the-aral-sea-dried-up-due-to-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Media: AP implies The Aral Sea dried up due to climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is a stretch – the AP tries to imply The Aral Sea dried up due to climate change: These men once relied on the Aral Sea. Today, the dry land is a reminder of lost livelihoods (yahoo.com)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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EDITORS\u2019 NOTE: This is the first piece in an AP series on the once-massive Aral Sea, the lives of those who\u2019ve lived and worked on its shores, and the effects of climate change and restoration efforts in the region. The AP visited both sides of the Aral, in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, to document the changing landscape.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Deeper into the story they note that Soviet-era projects had drained the area by diverting the incoming rivers into irrigation projects. But they’ve bundled this in to their “effects of climate change” series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does Bing Chat have to say about The Aral Sea?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Aral Sea, once the fourth largest lake in the world, has been shrinking since the 1960s due to a major water diversion project undertaken by the Soviet Union on the arid plains of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.<\/strong> The region\u2019s two major rivers, fed by snowmelt and precipitation in faraway mountains, were used to transform the desert into farms for cotton and other crops. Although irrigation made the desert bloom, it devastated the Aral Sea. The lake was already a fraction of its 1960 extent at the start of the 21st century.<\/strong> The North Aral Sea had separated from the South (Large) Aral Sea. The South Aral Sea had split into eastern and western lobes that remained tenuously connected at both ends. By 2001, the southern connection had been severed, and the shallower eastern part retreated rapidly over the next several years. Especially large retreats in the eastern lobe of the South Aral Sea appear to have occurred between 2005 and 2009, when drought limited and then cut off the flow of the Amu Darya. Water levels then fluctuated annually between 2009 and 2018 in alternately dry and wet years.<\/strong> In 2014, the eastern lobe of the South Aral Sea completely disappeared. The increasingly salty water became polluted with fertilizer and pesticides. The blowing dust from the exposed lakebed, contaminated with agricultural chemicals, became a public health hazard. The salty dust blew off the lakebed and settled onto fields, degrading the soil. Croplands had to be flushed with larger and larger volumes of river water. The loss of the moderating influence of such a large body of water made winters colder and summers hotter and drier. Although climate change has been a contributing factor to the shrinking of the Aral Sea, it is not the primary cause<\/a><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Additionally, this sea was shallow, with an average depth of 53 feet originally.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The media always looks for new angles on stories. \n\nEarlier this week, The Atlantic wrote a story saying that war in the Congo is good for the climate because it results in fewer trees being cut down. When peace occurs, businesses and settlers cut down more of the forest. Therefore, war is good for the climate. It’s quite a stretch of imagination to come up with stories like this but remember, about 80% of “reporters” have non-STEM backgrounds in English literature, creative writing, history and the arts. Creative story telling is what they do, and finding a new angle on an existing story can be challenging. But here we are – the Soviet era projects that diverted the rivers to irrigation from The Aral Sea, is now an example of climate change.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The AP stretches quite a bit to imply the shrinking of the shallow Aral Sea was due to climate change. Soviet-era irrigation projects diverted the incoming rivers to agriculture and the Sea immediately began shrinking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate-communications"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14786\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}