US west 'megadrought' is worst in at least 1,200 years, new study says
Gabrielle Canon in Los Angeles
Tue 15 Feb 2022 07.27 EST
Human-caused climate change significant driver of destructive conditions as even drier decades lie ahead, researchers say
The American west has spent the last two decades in what scientists are now saying is the most extreme megadrought in at least 1,200 years. In a new study, published on Monday, researchers also noted that human-caused climate change is a significant driver of the destructive conditions and offered a grim prognosis: even drier decades lie ahead.
“Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the west has been dry for most of the last couple decades,” says Park Williams, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles and the study’s lead author. “We now know from these studies that is dry not only from the context of recent memory but in the context of the last millennium.”
Turning up the temperature – the result of human caused warming – has played a big part. Other studies show how the climate crisis “will increasingly enhance the odds of long, widespread and severe megadroughts”, the researchers write. Noting that as the west is now in the midst of the driest 22-year period in knowable history, “this worst-case scenario already appears to be coming to pass”.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/15/us-west-megadrought-worst-1200-years-study
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