• Privacy Policy
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
Climate Change Dispatch
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us
No Result
View All Result
Climate Change Dispatch
No Result
View All Result

Meteorologist: There Is No Link Between Droughts And Climate Change

by Anthony Watts
May 17, 2023, 10:39 AM
in News and Opinion
Reading Time: 5 mins read
A A
2

drought lake bedA May 11, 2023 opinion piece in Yale Climate Connections (YCC) titled, “Climate change and droughts: What’s the connection?” link climate change and droughts in the United States.

The opinion is provably false.

There is no evidence climate change is making droughts in the United States worse. [emphasis, links added]

The YCC article opens by saying, “For tens of millions of Americans, drought has become an ever-present natural disaster.”

To bolster this claim, the article cites this August 10, 2021 graphic from the U.S. Drought Monitor:

Figure 1: August 10, 2021, U.S. Drought map. Source: U.S. Drought Monitor

The YCC goes off the rails by citing a U.S. drought map from nearly two years ago while making arguments about drought in the present.

When you access the map that they should have referenced for their May 11 article, dated May 9, 2023, an entirely different picture emerges, as seen in Figure 2 below:

Figure 2: May 9, 2023, U.S. Drought map. Source: U.S. Drought Monitor

Unsurprisingly, YCC seems to have chosen the August 10, 2021, map for their article because the plethora of deep reds fits the narrative that climate change is causing drought, whereas the most recent map shown in Figure 2 undermines this claim since virtually all the drought in the Western United States has dissipated.

This is a very inconvenient truth for the story the YCC opinion piece is trying to tell.

Later in the article, the author asks and answers this question:

Is global warming causing more droughts?

Scientists see a clear correlation between droughts and global warming. But a correlation between two events does not always mean one caused the other.

…

It can be tricky to attribute an increase in droughts to global warming because droughts are variable. In other words, they can occur every year or every few years, last for years or decades, and cause varying levels of dryness. That makes it difficult to distinguish random events from those possibly shaped by human-caused warming.

So, which is it YCC? Is there a clear correlation, or is it tricky to make a correlation? The answer lies in real-world data, not in the opinions of pundits and doomsayers.

[The graph seen in Figure 3] provided by the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) shows the contiguous United States percentage area of very wet and very dry data, derived from standardized precipitation values, which are based on the U.S. Climate Divisional Dataset.

Figure 3: Data showing the percentage of U.S. that is either very wet (green) or very dry (orange) since 1895. Source: NCEI

There is no upward or downward trend in this data. However, examining the data carefully shows that some of the biggest dry spikes are far in the past, such as in October 1952, when 78.42% of the contiguous United States was listed as very dry.

This happened well before “human-caused climate change” was ever even a subject, during a period when the Earth was in a cooling trend.

No drought since has matched the one experienced in 1952, or multiple dry periods that occurred even earlier in the 1930s and early 1900s.

Despite the historical record, YCC makes this claim:

In a 2020 study in the journal Science, for example, researchers observed how human-caused climate change is contributing to the 21st-century megadrought in the Western U.S. and northern Mexico by evaluating trends in modeled temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation data between 1901 and 2018. According to the study’s findings, human-caused warming accounts for 46% of this drought’s severity.

The key difference is this: “…modeled temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation.” Model outputs are not the same and do not match real-world data.

Modeled data should never be used as a substitute for actual data when examining the past where actual data is available.

From Climate at a Glance: Drought, here are a few facts that YCC should have considered before falsely implying that climate change is increasing drought.

At the same time Yale was claiming the second hottest year on record, the U.S. had a record-low area of drought on May 23, 2017, when only 4.52% of the contiguous U.S. was in drought.

On April 9, 2019, that record was beaten when only 4.36% of the contiguous U.S. was classified in drought by the U.S. drought monitor.

The U.N. 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, while the IPCC reports having “low confidence” about any negative trends globally.

Droughts have always occurred, and they always will. The available evidence shows that recent years display no trend of increasing drought.

If droughts aren’t worsening then climate change can’t be causing worse droughts. Instead, global and U.S. drought data show recent droughts have been less frequent and severe than the droughts of the early and mid-twentieth century.

The recent drought history of the United States reflects natural variability, not a long-term trend upward amid modest warming.

Indeed, the United States recently underwent its longest period in recorded history with less than 40 percent of the country experiencing “very dry” conditions.

The author of the YCC editorial ignored these easily discoverable facts, perhaps out of ignorance—which is doubtful since she is trained as a meteorologist—, perhaps out of laziness, or most likely, because it undermined her predisposition to promote an alarmist climate change narrative, in this case by connecting recent droughts to climate change.

In any case, it was shoddy journalism. Instead of “seeking truth and reporting it”, she and YCC, which published her story, promoted unwarranted fears over demonstrable facts about climate change and drought.

Read more at Climate Realism

  • Truth
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Gettr
  • Threads
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Mastodon
  • Buffer
  • Telegram
  • Email
  • Copy Link
  • Share Using More Networks…

Popular Posts

Electric Vehicles (EVs)

The ‘Green’ Scam Of The Century: How ‘Renewables’ Increase Fossil Fuel Demands

Oct 23, 2024
News and Opinion

Antarctica Is Colder, Icier Today Than At Any Time In 5,000 Years

Apr 15, 2024
Energy

30-Plus Signs That The Climate Scam Is Collapsing

Apr 09, 2025

Comments 2

  1. SPURWING PLOVER says:
    2 years ago

    Never was and never will be its just a pattern that has more to do with the Sun and not Backyard BBQ,s and SUV,s

    Reply
  2. Joseph Repas says:
    2 years ago

    Every day I check with National weather Service for daily record highs and lows for each date at a major city nearby. How interesting that many days this month record high temperatures are still standing from the late 1800 ‘s !!! There were fewer people to burn anything,or even fart out methane! no airports to take temperatures near burning hot tarmacs. Many more wooded areas. Fewer roads. No aircraft at all! NO CARS! Yet, some of these years STILL hold on to dates with record high temperatures. Meanwhile, we have many years that are fairly recent like the 1950’s and later that have recorded record cold temperatures for these dates. Through all these many years there have been deoughts and floods and even [ gasp! ] Some really beautiful days!!! No such thing as man made global warming from carbon, it is manmade in that it is a bunch of nefarious lies to hurt and kill people.

    Reply

Comments are welcome! Those that add no discussion value may be removed.Cancel reply

Stay Connected On Social Media

gab-logo

Donate Today

Beating back the alarmist narrative takes time and money. Please donate today to help!

Recent Posts

  • oil rig drillAmerica’s Energy Boom Exposes The Folly Of Britain’s Net Zero Disaster
    Oct 3, 2025
    America’s energy boom and policy flexibility are widening the economic gap with Britain, where high prices and net zero goals are stalling growth. […]
  • Arctic sunsetNew Study Shows Arctic Sea Ice Decline Slowing, Driven More by Natural Variability Than Emissions
    Oct 3, 2025
    New study shows Arctic sea ice decline has slowed since 2012, driven more by natural variability than greenhouse gas emissions. […]
  • Attorney General Rob BontaNewsom Backs Off Climate Fight As AG Bonta Doubles Down On Suing Energy Firms
    Oct 3, 2025
    Two years after launching a high-profile climate lawsuit, Newsom is backing off while AG Rob Bonta doubles down on lawfare against major energy firms. […]
  • Farm irrigationMeteorologist Debunks Reuters’ Claim That Climate Change Threatens Europe’s Resources
    Oct 2, 2025
    Data show Europe’s droughts, weather, and biodiversity issues stem from mismanagement, not climate change, despite alarmist media claims. […]
  • Russ VoughtTrump Nixes $8B In ‘Green New Scam Funding’ In NYC, Blue States
    Oct 2, 2025
    Trump DOE halted billions in green energy projects citing poor economics, DEI hiring, and weak energy impact, sparking backlash in blue states. […]
  • SherrillRising Energy Costs And Dem Green Policies Top Of Mind In NJ Gubernatorial Race
    Oct 2, 2025
    New Jersey voters face rising energy costs as Democratic green policies and offshore wind expansion drive utility bills higher. […]
  • Hochul's green stringsHochul’s Election-Year ‘Inflation Refund’ Checks Can’t Cover Costs Of Her Green Agenda
    Oct 2, 2025
    Hochul’s election-year ‘inflation refund’ checks won’t offset the soaring living costs and utility hikes her green-energy agenda created. […]
  • South Asia monsoonSouth Asia Monsoons Not Becoming More Dangerous From Climate Change, Data Confirms
    Oct 1, 2025
    Claims that climate change is making South Asia’s monsoons more extreme ignore history, data, and other major causes of flooding. […]
  • wildfire carsRick Scott Wants Answers On What California Did With Federal Wildfire Funds
    Oct 1, 2025
    Sen. Rick Scott is demanding answers on how California spent federal money earmarked for preventing and fighting wildfires. […]
  • Biden test driving an all-electric Ford F-150.Ford CEO Warns U.S. EV Sales Could Halve After Federal Subsidies End
    Oct 1, 2025
    Ford warns U.S. electric vehicle sales could drop as much as 5% after the $7,500 taxpayer-funded federal subsidies expire in a month. […]

Get Instant Email Notifications

Subscribe to receive a digest of daily stories, or get emailed once they're published. Check your Junk/Spam folder for a verification email.

Submit a tip

Please enter your email, so we know you're human.

Books You May Like

very convenient warming

exposing great lie

Have a suggestion? Let us know! We swap out books based on your input. We participate in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. See here.

  • About
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact Us

© Portions copyright Climate Change Dispatch

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us

© 2025 Climate Change Dispatch

Share via
  • Facebook
  • Like
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • VKontakte
  • Print
  • Email
  • Reddit
  • Buffer
  • Love This
  • Weibo
  • Pocket
  • Xing
  • Odnoklassniki
  • WhatsApp
  • Meneame
  • Blogger
  • Amazon
  • Yahoo Mail
  • Gmail
  • AOL
  • Newsvine
  • HackerNews
  • Evernote
  • MySpace
  • Mail.ru
  • Viadeo
  • Line
  • Flipboard
  • Comments
  • SMS
  • Viber
  • Telegram
  • Subscribe
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Kakao
  • LiveJournal
  • Yammer
  • Edgar
  • Fintel
  • Mix
  • Instapaper
  • Copy Link
  • Truth
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Gettr
  • Baidu
  • Mastodon
  • Threads
  • Bluesky
Share via
  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • VKontakte
  • Print
  • Email
  • Reddit
  • Buffer
  • Love This
  • Weibo
  • Pocket
  • Xing
  • Odnoklassniki
  • WhatsApp
  • Meneame
  • Blogger
  • Amazon
  • Yahoo Mail
  • Gmail
  • AOL
  • Newsvine
  • HackerNews
  • Evernote
  • MySpace
  • Mail.ru
  • Viadeo
  • Line
  • Flipboard
  • Comments
  • SMS
  • Viber
  • Telegram
  • Subscribe
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Kakao
  • LiveJournal
  • Yammer
  • Edgar
  • Fintel
  • Mix
  • Instapaper
  • Copy Link
  • Truth
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Gettr
  • Baidu
  • Mastodon
  • Threads
  • Bluesky