Climate Change Intensifying California Drought

California can blame about a fifth of the state’s record drought on climate change, scientists say.

The study appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. This announcement points to a notable sign of growing effect of climate change.

The current drought is the most severe on record, state officials say, and 2014 was the hottest year in state history. The team analyzed humidity, precipitation, temperature, wind, and other factors. They could find no long-term rainfall trend.

This year, California entered its fourth year of drought. This was cause for mild alarm, but more importantly, moisture evaporated at an unusually intense rate from soil, trees and crops. But warming adds to the resulting dryness and heat.

While scientists have made such assertions before, this is first study to estimate how much worse.

The researchers estimate that between 8% and 27% of the drought is likely attributable to climate change.

According to the scientists, natural variations in temperature and rainfall patterns led to the drought.

A four-year drought has ravaged the state of California, but future dry spells could be even worse. What’s more is the study found that by 2060, California will likely experience permanent drought conditions.

Researchers also warn that arrival of rains later this year in winter may lull people. Williams said that when that happens people should not rest assured that everything would get back to normal.

Williams compared precipitation to currency, and said that climate change is causing the value of snowflakes and raindrops to “inflate”. “We can’t attribute any particular weather event to climate change”, he said a few weeks after Hurricane Sandy in 2012″.

Currently, California is still in a state that is better off. That is than the rest of the US of A. But if things continue in the same manner, it will end up a victim to desertification.

Columbia University Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory bioclimatologist Park Williams puts into a different perspective. They showed that massive irrigation from underground aquifers has been offsetting global warming in some areas, because the water cools the air. The effect has been especially sharp in California’s heavily irrigated Central Valley-possibly up to 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit during some seasons. Scientists call this process “positive feedback”.

The study actually corroborates earlier research from scientists like Noah Diffenbaugh, a senior climatologist at Stanford University. A new scientific study offers definitive evidence that anthropogenic climate change has amplified the drought out West, making it 15 to 20 per cent worse than it would have been otherwise.