In other words, without heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions causing temperatures to rise, the drought would have been 8% to 27% less severe than it is, said John Abatzoglou, a University of Idaho climate researcher and coauthor of a study published Thursday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
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Park Williams from Columbia University as the lead author of the study stressed that the new study would most probably shed new light towards the establishment of solutions for the ongoing climatic changes together with the associated environmental repercussions such as California’s drought.
California doesn’t look like it’s going to get rid of the drought this week either, and a study conducted by a small group of scientists wanted to reveal exactly how much human-created climate change affects this drought.
Researchers quantified the effect from global warming on the present drought in California with the help of a soil moisture accounting method. “But (global) warming changes the baseline amount of water that’s available to us, because it sends water back into the sky” through evaporation. California is the world’s eighth-largest economy, ahead of most countries, but many scientists think that the nice weather it is famous for may now be in the process of going away. It has been noticed that in the last few years, natural climate precipitations have declined significantly and temperatures have increased alarmingly. But, now, warm months are even drier because the melting of snow has accelerated or the snowpack hasn’t been formed, the release said. “And we are now at a point where the bully’s asking for so much that when natural climate variability is already dictating that we would be in a drought, it is hard to both give the bully the amount of moisture that he needs and also still to satisfy our own demands for moisture”.
The scale of the drought caused by the increasing temperatures and weather changes in the last century have been estimated at around 15-20%. The squeeze that global warming is putting on California’s water balance is therefore becoming increasingly detectable. This means that by around the 2060s, more or less permanent drought will set in, interrupted only by the rainiest years.
While the study isn’t the first to make such conclusions, researchers said it is the most specific.
Climatologist Noah Diffenbaugh, who led the earlier Stanford research, said the new study is an important step forward.
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He added that California will eventually experience wet conditions again, but that will still be followed by dry and likely drier than current conditions, indicating that the drought will deepen in the future.
