Last Year’s U.S. Drought Wasn’t Caused by Climate Change

Those advocating limits on greenhouse gases can’t count on the weather to make their argument.

Last summer, in response to an intense and prolonged drought in the U.S.—the worst, indeed, since 1895—we ran an interview with a climate scientist, Thomas Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina. He said that droughts in general will be exacerbated by climate change, while noting that it’s difficult to link any particular drought to greenhouse gases. “I suspect it will be really difficult to show how much these changing patterns contributed to the drought in the Midwest this year,” he said (see “Is Climate Change to Blame for the Current U.S. Drought?”).