A new study has found that 42 per cent of the drought conditions are directly from human-caused warming. The American West’s megadrought is now at its driest point in at least 1,200 years. Before 2021, the year 2002 was one of the driest years ever recorded for the region.
This 22-year drought passed the previous record-holder of megadroughts, in the late 1500s. According to the study published on Monday, the drought shows no signs of easing in the near future. The study was published in the journal Nature Climate Change and was written by study lead author Park Williams, a climate hydrologist at UCLA.
Williams explained that “climate change is changing the baseline conditions toward a drier, gradually drier state in the West and that means the worst-case scenario keeps getting worse,… This is right in line with what people were thinking of in the 1900s as a worst-case scenario. But today I think we need to be even preparing for conditions in the future that are far worse than this.”
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