Human Activity Makes Droughts Worse—and More Likely to Happen
Weather alone can’t explain the length and severity of recent dry spells.
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.
Photographer: Mario Villafuerte/Bloomberg
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.
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.