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I've heard that scientists expect the world to get drier as well as warmer. This is surprising since warm air holds more moisture, but I recall reading something that explained quite well why it will get drier. Do you think it's true? Does global warming mean a more desert-like world in general as opposed to a more tropical and humid world?
More water should circulate in the atmosphere when ice caps melt (and more air moisture), so I think the earth as a whole gets wetter with global warming. Though it is possible that already wet areas become even wetter and semi arid places become deserts.
I remember I have read somewhere that the Sahara was a wet savanna during a warm period and extended almost to the equator during a cold epoch.
A warmer planet is expected to be wetter overall due to increasing evaporation, but not all the planet would get this way, and some regions could get drier. Mid-latitude western coasts/adjacent areas might be the more prone to become drier, as anticyclones would slightly drift towards higher latitudes.
To clarify, I said 'wetter' as meaning 'bigger amount of precipitation'. However, in a warmer climate you need more precipitation than in a cooler one in order to avoid drought. This is why an increasing of warm/hot areas would favour frequency of droughts around the world, even though floods could still occur the same way or even more severely.
*I didn't say it will happen, but this is a scenario of what can happen with higher global temperatures*
I think global warming will lead to drier average winters for California since our climate gets rain paired with cooler temperatures. However, when we do get our El Nino years, they might even be wetter than the previous ones due to a much stronger subtropical jet over warmer SST. Our new pattern could be several years of under 6 inches of rain per season in L.A. followed by a winter with over 35 inches of rain.
In theory, the world is supposed to get wetter, but in practice it the world has been getting drier since the 1980s. It's still much wetter than it was in the 1930s, but still the trend is not as expected. No one knows why yet.
Here is an example from where I live. As you can see there is no correlation between temperature and precipitation (records began in 1897). Notice that both the warmest and the coldest years on record had normal precipitation amounts.
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