Professor Dick Peltier , global climate change researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto, is very interested in the impact of climate change on water resources. In Ontario where climate is moderated to a degree by the presence of the Great Lakes, the most severe impact of the global warming process is going to be found in extreme events. For instance, we will see a dramatic increase in periods of intense precipitation like the one that flooded Toronto in 2013 . This was a hugely important extreme precipitation event which in the past would have happened once every 30, 40, or 50 years. By Prof. Peltier’s calculations, the timescale for these events will start being compressed by a factor of 2, making these events appear every 25 years. This means we are looking at a future where extreme precipitation events, events of extreme warmth and drought conditions will be more frequent and more severe.
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