Human Activity Makes Droughts Worse—and More Likely to Happen

Now we know for sure: human-caused warming played a critical role in creating the mega-drought that’s been drying up the American Southwest for the last two decades.

A field of cotton is parched by the sun in Lamar County near Paris, in
northeast Texas as the temperature hit 104 degrees on August 16, 2006. 

The drought that struck the Southwestern U.S. from 2000 to 2019 was the second-driest period in the area since at least 800 C.E., reducing rivers to a trickle and causing widespread water rationing. That wasn’t all because of man-made climate change, but a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science concludes that human activity played a significant role in making it worse.

Park Williams, a researcher with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and a lead author of the study, said researchers found human activity accounted for 47% of the drought’s severity. That has potentially devastating implications for future dry spells.

Read the story from Bloomberg Green by Leslie Kaufman - “Human Activity Makes Droughts Worse—and More Likely to Happen.”