As others have said – The Sun is perhaps not the best source of information. Personally I wouldn’t even trust the date printed on it.
The Aral Sea is just one of many lakes that have all but dried up, I believe it has been reduced in size by some 90% in recent decades, other lakes in the former Soviet Union, Africa and Asia have suffered similar fates and there are some which have disappeared completely.
The Aral Sea is in the former Soviet Union and many years ago, under the communist regime, the authorities instituted massive agricultural projects as part of their strategy of collectivisation. This was based on policies of state farming (sovkhozes) and collective farming (kolkhozes). One of the primary objectives was for the USSR to become entirely self-sufficient in the production of grains, cotton, cereals and other crops.
In achieving this objective it was necessary to extensively irrigate the arid regions in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and this meant diverting many rivers. One of the consequences was that several lakes completely dried up and the Aral Sea was drastically reduced in size.
To claim that global warming is responsible for the near disappearance of the Aral Sea is either sensationalist reporting or the work of a journalist who is too lazy to get his facts straight.
In Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth he uses Lake Chad as an example of global warming. Like the Aral Sea, this too has significantly reduced in size but what Gore forgets to mention is that Lake Chad has also been subjected to unsustainable withdrawal of water and again it’s primarily for irrigation purposes.
Other lakes and rivers have been affected for similar reasons and due to the construction of dams and hydro electric plants or ‘hushing’, the process of using water to wash away soils so as to expose the rocks and minerals beneath.
