California Drought May Have Been Partly Caused by Climate Change

It turns out that climate change may have worsened California's drought. Scientists have found that the changing climate has actually aggravated the state's drought, causing between 8 and 27 percent of the dry conditions.

"This would be a drought no matter what," said A. Park Williams, climate scientist and the lead author of the new study, in an interview with The New York Times. "It would be a fairly bad drought no matter what. But it's definitely made worse by global warming."

In this latest study, the researchers examined monthly weather data. This included rainfall and temperatures that went back 114 years. By doing so, the scientists were able to isolate the proportion of the drought due to climate change as opposed to natural weather variations that have heated up the state.

The findings reveal that climate change is impacting the state. This isn't all that surprising as temperatures continue to rise. In fact, the NOAA recently announced that July was the hottest month on record globally for average ocean and land temperatures.

"In California, adaptation to a dry climate has been happening for over a century and will continue to occur," said Martin Hoerling, a NOAA scientist who was not involved with the study, in an interview with USA Today. "Climate change is only one of many pressing demands of water, and all are part of a complicated and interwoven policy and social context through which the state's water supply is distributed."

The findings are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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