 This paper examines the relationship between projected changes in atmospheric specific humidity, precipitation, and evaporation at local scales. The authors find that the simple attitudinal average Clausius-Clapeyron scaling relation does not hold at local scales over either ocean or land. Instead, they find that the climate model output shows a close relation to the Budaico framework of catchment hydrology. The authors also examine projections of key surface energy balance terms and find that the hydrologic sensitivity is much smaller than CC scaling due to the small fraction of realized surface forcing that is partitioned into evaporation. They conclude that a better understanding of the potential impacts of climate change on water availability will be gained by starting with the notion that the greater the enhancement of evaporation, the less the surface temperature increase and vice versa. This article was authored by M. L. Roderick, F. Sun, W. H. Lim, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.