Drought
The Art
The Science
What’s Alarming
Extreme weather events, such as droughts, are affecting the world’s supply of water, with severe seasonal droughts are already occurring in various parts of the globe. According to a recent analysis*, 170 scientific reports published from 2004 to mid-2018, covering 190 extreme weather events, found that about two-thirds of those events, particularly those involving extreme heat, droughts and flooding, were made more likely or severe by human-induced climate change.
Climate change is seriously affecting the supply of water in the southwestern area of the U.S.:
“Global warming has pushed what would have been a moderate drought in southwestern North America into megadrought territory. Williams et al. used a combination of hydrological modeling and tree-ring reconstructions of summer soil moisture to show that the period from 2000 to 2018 was the driest 19-year span since the late 1500s and the second driest since 800 CE (see the Perspective by Stahle). This appears to be just the beginning of a more extreme trend toward megadrought as global warming continues.”**
“The megadrought in the American Southwest has become so severe that it’s now the driest two decades in the region in at least 1,200 years, scientists said Monday, and climate change is largely responsible.
The drought, which began in 2000 and has reduced water supplies, devastated farmers and ranchers and helped fuel wildfires across the region, had previously been considered the worst in 500 years, according to the researchers.
But exceptional conditions in the summer of 2021, when about two-thirds of the West was in extreme drought, “really pushed it over the top,” said A. Park Williams, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who led an analysis using tree ring data to gauge drought. As a result, 2000-21 is the driest 22-year period since 800 A.D., which is as far back as the data goes.
The analysis also showed that human-caused warming played a major role in making the current drought so extreme.”***
Global warming from the burning of fossil fuels has made severe droughts like the record-breaking ones experienced in Europe, North America and China in the summer of 2022 at least 20 times as likely to occur as they would have been more than a century ago. “Combining all lines of evidence we find for West-Central Europe that human-induced climate change made the 2022 root zone soil moisture drought about 3-4 times more likely, and the surface soil moisture drought about 5-6 times more likely.”
https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/high-temperatures-exacerbated-by-climate-change-made-2022-northern-hemisphere-droughts-more-likely/
The featured artwork was sketched from variations of the word “drought”.
*”Droughts, heatwaves and floods: How to tell when climate change is to blame” , Nature International Journal of Science, July 2018
**”Large contribution from anthropogenic warming to an emerging North American megadrought”, A. Park Williams, et al,Science 17 Apr 2020:
Vol. 368, Issue 6488, pp. 314-318
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz9600
***”How Bad Is the Western Drought? Worst in 12 Centuries, Study Finds.” Henry Fountain, New York Times, Feb. 14, 2022
