By Henry Fountain / Source: nytimes

The severe California drought that has led the state to order cutbacks in water use may not have been set off by climate change, scientists say, but global warming is making the situation worse.

“The drought is made of two components: not enough rain and too much heat,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton. “The rain deficit isn’t clearly connected to climate change, but the planetary warming has made it more likely that the weather would be hotter in California.”

Warmer temperatures worsen drought by causing more evaporation from reservoirs, rivers and soil. Scientists say that the warming trend makes it highly likely that California and other parts of the Western United States will have more severe droughts in the future.

“The 21st century for sure is being characterized by persistent, ubiquitous drought in the West,” said Deke Arndt, the chief of the climate monitoring branch of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. “The projection is for that to continue.”

The current drought, which began in 2011, is the worst in 120 years of climate record-keeping in the state, and some studies suggest it is the worst in more than a thousand years.

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