August 20, 2019
By David Flemming
The lower 48 states in the US have the smallest levels of drought in years. That is the conclusion any observer will come to after looking at the US Drought Monitor, a project produced jointly by the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). As of August 6, only 4.4% (see chart) of the US is in drought, slightly higher than the 19-year low of 2.3% this past April.
What does this mean in regards to climate change? Not much- after all, we have only have two decades of data, while the earth’s climate has been changing for centuries. That didn’t stop climate alarmists from using California’s record-breaking drought to jump to conclusions regarding the severity of climate change and the potential for parts of California to be uninhabitable in the 2020’s. But California’s drought ended in March, and the rest of the US is similarly in good shape, at least water wise.
Of the 30 lowest US drought weeks in the past 1023 weeks, 19 have occurred in 2019.
Since climate change is a global phenomenon, we should strive to work on measuring droughts on a global scale, which is much more difficult to do than just measuring the US. We should continue to measure CO2 emissions, sea levels and frequency of storm events to get a better picture about how climate change is affecting our the environment and our quality of life, and adjust our lives accordingly. Ideally, with maximum personal responsibility and minimal government involvement.
David Flemming is a policy analyst at the Ethan Allen Institute. Thanks to Bjorn Lomborg for pointing me to this dataset.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
If the US really wanted to stop emitting the CO2 that is supposed to be driving climate change, it should use all the money wasted on renewables to start building breeder reactors. It has enough depleted uranium and spent nuclear fuel to provide power for centuries.
It could also use nuclear power to turn water and CO2 into gasoline. The CO2 could be extracted from the ocean. The CO2 in the atmosphere and the ocean surface is in equilibrium, so the carbon and the hydrogen of the gasoline would be continually recycled.
The experts didn’t have to spend hours contemplating their collective navels to come to this profound observation. All they had to do was watch the six o’clock news.