Essay On California Drought

Water is an essential factor for survival for all species and the number one ingredient to sustain life, without water nothing would survive. As Californians already know – or should know by now – California is in a severe drought as of 2012 and has been in a drought for the past 100 years and so on. California has a “Mediterranean” climate where it has a concentrated rainy season followed by a long dry season. For the fourth year in a row the rainy period has not begun, and as Griffin and Anchukaitis state, “the current event is the most severe drought in the last 1200 years.” Now the question is, is the current severe drought due to man-made global warming or due to natural causes in the weather patterns? While natural causes do sound more understandable, manmade climate change is the only real way to explain why the drought has gone this severe in the last four years out of all these years.

Researchers have been looking at soil moisture data every month since 1901 to analyze how much the warming has affected the Californian drought. Valentine says it was found that, published in Geophysical Research Letters, “climate change can be blamed for between 8 to 27 percent of the drought conditions between 2012 and 2014”, leaning heavily on 20 percent. While this 20 percent of man-made climate change may sound small, the probability of extreme drought case had increased by a whole 100 percent. Now, instead of severe drought years occurring 7 percent of time in a climate change free zone, it is now at a 14 percent. That is to say, the effect of climate change having on the drought had been scientifically proven by scientists and researchers that proves that the current severe drought is a man-made