Drought is heating up around the warming world. Particularly hot drought has cost more than US$40 billion and claimed 218 human lives since 2010 in the United States alone. These hot and dry conditions have also contributed to unusually widespread and devastating wildfires, fuelled by wide expanses of weakened and dead trees that were unable to deal with heat stress and subsequent insect attack. Yet, to get a real sense of how this recent change in drought severity might shape the future, one has to look to the past. An analysis of regional and pan-continental North American drought over the past 1,000 years, reported by Cook et al.3 in the Journal of Climate, makes it clear that recent droughts, as costly as they have been, are only a taste of what might lie ahead, independently of any big climate change.
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