4 ms·

Massive drought was caused by global warming: warmer air absorbed lot of water. Now this water will circulate.

• thephyber 10y ago
  Climate change is a long-term thing. No single weather event can definitively be tied to it. This drought is just one event in a long line of documented historical droughts in California. Yes, it's worse than the other ones in recorded history, but we've only been recording for ~200 years so the sample size is small. We can observe further back via tree rings and other creative forensics, but you also have to factor in the different climate. It's not like California didn't have any major droughts before global warming. Additionally, humans have gutted the only major rainforest in our hemisphere in just the past 30 years. It's entirely possible that the California drought has much more to do with the Amazon being slash-n-burned than due to carbon emissions (although they both contribute to global warming).