Hotter, bigger, drier, longer: Climate change is driving multiyear megadroughts. Really!

This alarmism and hysteria is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science AAAS. A piece of junk science!

Some major, obvious flaws of this study and its interpretation:

1. The ideological motivation or false premise of this study: Changing climate drives severe long lasting weather events.
2. The study does not go further back than 1980 probably due to lack of satellite data. Thus, we do not actually know the past except e.g. the Dust Bowl (1930-1936) was mentioned.
3. World population also dramatically changed. Around 1900, it was less than 2 billion people, by 2020 it was almost 8 billion people. How much water do a billion people need on a daily basis?
4. It seems some forms of vegetation recover quickly others are not seriously affected. As so often, the resilience and recovery of nature is conveniently ignored to increase the scaremongering impact!

"A series of severe dust storms ravaged the American and Canadian prairies in the 1930s. The disaster, which came to be known as the Dust Bowl, demonstrated the ecological devastation that could be wrought by long-lasting droughts. Recent multiyear drought events in Chile, the western United States, and Australia have also caused catastrophic damage. And according to a new Science study, these “megadroughts” are getting longer, hotter, drier, and more frequent under climate change.

Drawing on global meteorological data, researchers identified more than 13,000 droughts lasting more than two years between 1980 and 2018. They found that these events have become longer, more extreme, and more widespread since the 1980s, with the amount of affected land growing by about 50,000 kilometers each year. “That’s an area bigger than Switzerland,” study co-author Dirk Karger tells New Scientist . Satellite images revealed that the effect of these droughts on vegetation varied across ecosystems, with temperate grasslands showing a particularly dramatic shift from green to brown—although these areas also tended to bounce back more rapidly post-drought than forest ecosystems. ..."

"... Rising temperatures lead to more extreme weather ..." Clearly a statement of junk science by Swiss institute responsible for this study.

From the editor's summary and abstract:

"Editor’s summary

Droughts are increasing in frequency and severity worldwide as climate warms. The question is, are the longest-lasting and most severe of these, called “megadroughts,” also happening more often and, if so, where? Chen et al. used a morphological approach to identify megadroughts globally over the past 40 years and applied drought and plant-greenness indices to determine their impacts on vegetation ... The authors concluded that megadroughts also are increasing in occurrence, frequency, and severity on a global scale, and identified the regions where the vegetation is highly susceptible to these episodes. ...

Abstract

Persistent multiyear drought (MYD) events pose a growing threat to nature and humans in a changing climate. We identified and inventoried global MYDs by detecting spatiotemporally contiguous climatic anomalies, showing that MYDs have become drier, hotter, and led to increasingly diminished vegetation greenness. The global terrestrial land affected by MYDs has increased at a rate of 49,279 ± 14,771 square kilometers per year from 1980 to 2018. Temperate grasslands have exhibited the greatest declines in vegetation greenness during MYDs, whereas boreal and tropical forests have had comparably minor responses. With MYDs becoming more common, this global quantitative inventory of the occurrence, severity, trend, and impact of MYDs provides an important benchmark for facilitating more effective and collaborative preparedness toward mitigation of and adaptation to such extreme events."

ScienceAdviser

Mega-droughts are becoming more frequent and intense worldwide (original press release) "A study led by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL shows that there has been a worrying increase in the number of long droughts over the last 40 years. These affect agriculture, energy production and ecosystems, the research team warns ..."

Global increase in the occurrence and impact of multiyear droughts (no public access)