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Media Fail: Western Drought Is Neither Historic Nor Linked To Climate Change

by H. Sterling Burnett
June 09, 2021, 8:03 AM
in News and Opinion
Reading Time: 4 mins read
A A
5

cracked earth drought cityYahoo News is promoting the false claim that human climate change is responsible for a historic drought covering California and the Western United States.

Although drought conditions have persisted for a couple of years now across portions of the Western United States, droughts in the dry West are common and research shows much larger, longer-term droughts have occurred there historically.

Because current conditions are not outside the historic records of drought, there is no evidence human greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to the current drought.

In a story, titled, “California and much of the American West face mega-drought brought on by climate change,”

Yahoo News claims: “Thanks in part to rising temperatures due to climate change, “extreme” or “exceptional” drought conditions are now occurring in 74 percent of the state of California, while 72 percent of the Western U.S. is classified as experiencing “severe” drought, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor.”

“Back-to-back dry years in conjunction with above-average temperatures have exacerbated drought conditions across the American West, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on its website,” continues Yahoo News.

“The extent of the drought is unprecedented in recorded history, with 100 percent of both California and Nevada now classified as experiencing ‘moderate to exceptional drought.’”

Data shows “back-to-back” dry years are not unusual in California or the Western United States, even in recorded history, and neither California nor the Western United States is experiencing a historic drought.

Undermining Yahoo News’ alarmist story is the fact that when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) brought back its Climate Change Indicator series in mid-May, the agency’s post, titled “Climate Change Indicators: Drought,” reported no cause for alarm that climate change is increasing drought.

The data cited and graphed by the EPA shown in Figure 1 indicates no trend towards greater numbers of droughts or droughts of greater severity.

“Average drought conditions across the nation have varied over time,” writes EPA. “The 1930s and 1950s saw the most widespread droughts, while the last 50 years have generally been wetter than average [see the figure below]. Over the entire period … the overall trend has been toward wetter conditions,” wrote EPA.

Figure 1: This chart shows annual values of the Palmer Drought Severity Index, averaged over the entire area of the contiguous 48 states. Positive values represent wetter-than-average conditions, while negative values represent drier-than-average conditions. A value between -2 and -3 indicates moderate drought, -3 to -4 is severe drought, and -4 or below indicates extreme drought. The thicker line is a nine-year weighted average. Data source: NOAA, 20217 Web update: April 2021

EPA’s drought climate change indicator confirms what other sources of data have shown. As reported in Climate at a Glance: Drought, for example, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports with “high confidence” that precipitation has increased over mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere (including the United States) during the past 70 years.

IPCC also has “low confidence” about any negative precipitation trends occurring globally.

Moreover, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports America is currently undergoing its longest period in recorded history with less than 40 percent of the country experiencing “very dry” conditions.

Also, the United States in 2017 – and then again in 2019 – registered its smallest percentage of land area experiencing drought. The year 2019, for example, ranked among California’s wettest years since official records have been kept.

Interestingly, the graphic accompanying the Yahoo News story fails to include the drought map of Colorado.

Perhaps this is unsurprising [because if] Yahoo News included data from Colorado in its story, it would have undermined the claim that the drought in the Western U.S. was historic.

Although nearly two-thirds of Colorado was experiencing severe drought or worse in June of 2020, currently more than half the state is experiencing no drought at all, and just 35 percent of the state is experiencing severe drought or worse.

Going back further in time, research conclusively demonstrates the current drought in the Western United States is not historic in length or severity.

It is well-recognized that drought is cyclical, and mega-droughts, some lasting 100 years or more, have been commonplace in the past, as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2: According to tree-ring studies, (Cook et al. North American drought: Reconstructions, causes, and consequences) western droughts were far, far, worse in the past, lasting as long as 200 years. The most intense drought was about 1153 AD according to the data.

In the book “The West Without Water,” the authors write:

“Prolonged droughts — some of which lasted more than a century — brought thriving civilizations, such as the ancestral Pueblo (Native Americans) of the Four Corners region, to starvation, migration, and finally collapse.”

Indeed, research shows decade-long droughts happen once or twice a century in the Western United States, and droughts last for multiple decades, occur a few times each millennium.

In a 2016 Columbia University Academic Commons paper, the authors state:

“During the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), Western North America experienced episodes of intense aridity that persisted for multiple decades or longer. These mega-droughts are well documented in many proxy records, but the causal mechanisms are poorly understood.”

To conclude, contrary to the Yahoo News report, “back-to-back” years of drought are hardly uncommon.

Also, since mega-droughts of the past in the Western United States have lasted for decades and even centuries or more, it is impossible to attribute current drought conditions, only two years old, to human-caused global warming.

Read more at Climate Realism

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Comments 5

  1. David Lewis says:
    4 years ago

    The facts don’t matter. Yahoo has a climate change agenda to sell.

    I don’t have to look up historic records to know about California droughts. I lived there in the 1970’s when there was a seven year drought. I walked to the water level of Shasta Dam. I looked up scaffolding that was used to build the dam. It was one to two hundred feet above the water while it is normally about that far below the water level. Droughts are normal for California.

  2. Spurwing Plover says:
    4 years ago

    I suppose if a another Dust Bowl happened today like it did back in the 1930’s the M.S. Media would be blaming it on Global Warming/Climate Change

  3. Dr Tim Ball - Historical Climatologist says:
    4 years ago

    Dr Tim Ball – Historical Climatologist
    http://www.generalistjournal.com
    Book: ‘The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science’
    Book: ‘Human Caused Global Warming, the Biggest Deception in History’

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0o8Hhjes_0
    https://www.technocracy.news/dr-tim-ball-on-climate-lies-wrapped-in-deception-smothered-with-delusion/

  4. Barry Bateman says:
    4 years ago

    Good article. Think warming leads to less precipitation? Hardly. Warming leads to more evaporation, which moves more water to parched land.

    • Steve Bunten says:
      4 years ago

      Tony Heller had a YouTube video yesterday in that very topic. Should send a link if the video to these idiots at Yahoo. Maybe a little education would do them good!

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