Columbia University study ties southeast drought to population

With the world's governments working feverishly to create climate change legislation standards, a Columbia University study on drought conditions in the southeast disputes prior conclusions on the ties to global warming.

European leaders and worldwide environmental organizations have been pressuring the United States to move forward with a climate change bill. It's part of an ongoing effort to further the pressure on India and China to comply with emission standards and to help shape a global continuity on cap-and-trade legislative structure. To this end, there have been numerous attempts to attach randomly-occurring weather events to a bigger global warming umbrella - and to create a sense of urgency for the U.S. Congress to act. However, science has largely not supported these claims. The latest example of this lack of support can be found in a study from Columbia University on the underlining causes of a long drought in America's southeast region. The Columbia researchers found that the severe shortage was directly attributed to a significant rise in population growth. Prior explanations for the southeast drought centered on rainfall amounts and concluded falsely that global warming was to blame. The team analyzed data from weather instruments and compared the numbers with regional data that spanned a century. This information yielded findings that were "pretty normal and pretty typical by standards of what has happened in the region over the century." The connection between water scarcity and population growth is consistent with what has been experienced elsewhere in the world. “I am not going to criticize any governments for what they did or did not do,” Douglas LeComte, a drought specialist at the Climate Prediction Center of the National Weather Service, told The New York Times. “But if you have more people and the same amount of water storage, you are going to increase the impact of droughts.”