Claiming that droughts are a consequence of global warming is also wrong. The world has not seen a general increase in drought. A study published in Nature in March 2014 shows globally that there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.
The U.N. Climate Panel in 2012 concluded: “Some regions of the world have experienced more intense and longer droughts, in particular in southern Europe and West Africa, but in some regions droughts have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, for example, in central North America and northwestern Australia.”
No, bad source.
There are still large uncertainties regarding observed global-scale trends in
droughts. The AR4 reported based on analyses using PDSI (see Box 3-3)
that very dry areas had more than doubled in extent since 1970 at the
global scale (Trenberth et al., 2007). This assessment was, however,
largely based on the study by Dai et al. (2004) only. These trends in the
PDSI proxy were found to be largely affected by changes in temperature,
not precipitation (Dai et al., 2004). On the other hand, based on soil
moisture simulations with an observation-driven land surface model for
the time period 1950-2000, Sheffield and Wood (2008a) have inferred
trends in drought duration, intensity, and severity predominantly
decreasing, but with strong regional variation and including increases in
some regions. They concluded that there was an overall moistening trend
over the considered time period, but also a switch since the 1970s to a
drying trend, globally and in many regions, especially in high northern
latitudes.
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