by Bob Walsh
It seems that the south-west region of the United States is now in what they are calling a mega-drought.
For some reason or other the people who study such things are looking at a 19-year chunk of time, from 2000-2019 and comparing it to similar lengths of time. One of the chief methods of doing this is careful analysis of tree rings. They have studied 30,000 trees in over 1,500 locations. The only time they can find when it was drier in the western region was from 1576-1603.
Lake Mead is now at 44% of capacity. This lake is considered to be a better long-term indicator of what is going on than the smaller reservoirs in the west.
The study blames "at least half" of the current mega-drought on man-made global warming, so there is a significant political component to the thing.
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