The megadrought that has been affecting the Southwest United States over the last 22 years is the worst that’s hit that region in the last twelve centuries, a new study claims, reports NBC News.
Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the study points to human-caused climate change for the reason the region is experiencing a catastrophic long-term drought. While the rest of the globe has experienced an average temperature increase of 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1800s, this region has experienced a 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit increase on top of that.
“It’s a slow-motion train wreck,” Jason Smerdon, one of the study’s authors and a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said. “What we showed in the paper is that increasing temperatures in the Southwest contributed about 42 percent to the severity of this drought.”