drought

Unrelenting rains led to a miserable famine in Europe from 1315-1317. Just how wet was it? A new study reveals that the beginning of the famine included some of the wettest years in the last 700 years.

Park Williams and Richard Seager, climate experts at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, discuss why California wildfires are expected to expand and intensify with climate change.

In an unusual new study, scientists say they have detected a growing fingerprint of human-driven global warming on global drought conditions starting as far back as 1900.

The current megadrought in the American West may be one of the most severe in the past 1200 years—and climate change is partially to blame.

Access to adequate fresh water supplies is a critically important societal challenge posed by climate change. With rising heat and shifting rainfall patterns, and reduced water storage resilience, fresh water supplies are already diminishing in the western United States, Mexico, the Middle East, and Mediterranean. Water shortages have been implicated in recent international conflict, and a recent Department of Defense study underscores the geopolitical importance of this problem.

As the American Southwest grows hotter, the risk of severe, long-lasting megadroughts rises, passing 90 percent likelihood by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current pace, a new study says. If we aggressively reduce greenhouse gas emissions, however, we can cut that risk substantially, the authors write.