Fresh water evaporates from the oceans, rains out over land and then runs back into the seas. Global warming has been speeding up this hydrological cycle recently, a change that could lead to more violent storms. It could also alter where precipitation falls — drying temperate areas, those places where most people now live. With climate warming, long-frozen stores of water — glaciers and permafrost — could be gushing into the seas from regions largely out of humanity’s view.

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