{"id":14853,"date":"2012-07-11T15:13:36","date_gmt":"2012-07-11T20:13:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=14853"},"modified":"2012-07-16T11:20:19","modified_gmt":"2012-07-16T16:20:19","slug":"how-climate-change-exacerbated-the-drought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2012\/07\/11\/how-climate-change-exacerbated-the-drought\/","title":{"rendered":"How Climate Change Exacerbated the Drought"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo by Scott Olson\/Getty Images<\/p>

A weed grows out of the dry cracked bed of O.C. Fisher Lake in July 2011.<\/p><\/div>\n

Last year, Texas suffered the worst single-year drought on record<\/a>. It resulted in nearly $10 billion dollars in losses<\/a> to crops, livestock and timber in Texas, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).<\/p>\n

In a new report from NOAA,\u00a0\u201cState of The Climate,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0the agency\u00a0suggests that thanks to climate change, Texas is likely to see more extreme heat waves and dry spells like it did last year. Twenty times more likely, in fact.<\/p>\n

Computer simulations from scientists in Oregon and England show heat waves and other weather patterns related to the La Ni\u00f1a weather pattern<\/a>(which results in hotter, drier weather in Texas) as 20 times more likely to occur today than 50 years ago. “We found that extreme heat events were roughly\u00a020 times more likely in 2008 than in other La Ni\u00f1a\u00a0years in the 1960s and indications of an increase in\u00a0frequency of low seasonal precipitation totals,” a paper within the report notes<\/a>. The conditions behind the drought are “distinctly more probable than they were\u00a040\u201350 years ago,” it says.<\/p>\n

While the research doesn’t blame climate change as the sole cause of the extreme drought, it explains how the odds of such events occurring have increased because of global warming.\u00a0Victor Murphy, a meterologist with the National Weather Service in Fort Worth tells the Houston Chronicle<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0warm and dry conditions thrive on each other.\u00a0\u201cDrought begets heat and then heat begets drought and a feedback cycle develops,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Researchers still have trouble directly relating the extreme weather patterns to climate change. But there is a link.\u00a0The scientists in the NOAA report\u00a0likened the effects of climate change on weather to the effects of steroids on a baseball player<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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