"We're Already In A Megadrought That's Not Going To End At Any Point In The 21st Century"

[hatrack]

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Last year I spoke to Park Williams and Ben Cook, authors of a study showing the uniqueness of the current dry spell in Western North America.
At that time, their 2019 study showed that the unfolding event was unparalleled in at least 500 or so years. The team, along with Jason Smerdon of Columbia, revisited the data in light of extreme dry conditions in 2020 and 21, and found that the current 22 year period is now dryer than any similar period since the 800s CE.

Oh.

Following up on that, I checked in with Samantha Stevenson and Julia Cole, who have a new paper that dovetails nicely. The point that Stevenson and Cole make is that with rising temperatures, the atmosphere has capacity to hold more moisture, in fact, it “wants” to hold more moisture, what scientists call “increased evaporative demand”, or ED.

As they explain, in the current 22 years and counting spell, while we may at some point return to rains such as were common in the last century, 1980s and 90s, by then the Evaporative Demand will be greater due to higher temps, and the bar will be raised. It will take more rain just to bring the region back to what was once considered “normal”.

The soil conditions already in place due to warming would, in past decades, have been considered already a mega drought, but now, that’s only the baseline.

EDIT

https://climatecrocks.com/2022/03/23/new-video-western-drought-will-never-go-back-to-normal-because-there-is-no-normal-now/#more-73009

[blue sky at night]

1. I was speaking with a woman at a party...

She was all excited about moving out to Arizona, raving about this and that; I reminded her about the drought and how they are now running out of water…she stopped talking to me at that point. We live in Ohio where water is pretty plentiful. I know one thing, the west can F off if they ever want to steal Great Lakes water.