Climate Change Supercharges Drought
While overuse and poor water allocation have long plagued the West’s troubled water system, climate change is playing a big role too. Research has shown that climate change has juiced up the West’s ongoing drought, attributing more than 40% of drought conditions to human-caused warming. Unseasonably hot temperatures—which also caused some unusual January and February wildfires—in the West this winter have helped create what the Bureau of Reclamation called an “abnormally dry winter season.”
