not so much climate change, it would seem, as bad Soviet water policy and the post-Soviet struggle to capture water:

The borders of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan straddle the former boundaries of the fast-drying sea. Soviet engineers in the 1950s started using water from the two rivers that supplied water to it, the Syr Darya in the north and the Amu Darya in the south, for the irrigation of farms.


By 2001, the disappearing lake had split into two halves, one smaller northern segmant and another larger southern half. By building a dam between the northern and southern halves in 2005, Kazakhstan tried to stem the shrinkage of the northern part of the sea. Engineers allowed the Syr Darya to continue to flow into the smaller, northern basin of the sea.


But for the larger, southern basin, the one that is now dry, the dam was a “death sentence” because it prevented the flow of water, NASA said.
http://america.aljazeera.com/article...ea-shrink.html