Is The Drought Really Caused by Global Warming?

NBC News stated last week, If we didn't have global warming, we wouldn't be seeing this. [the fires in the West and the heat and drought in the East]

Now that the worst of the heat has broken in a number of areas, perhaps we can cool the rhetoric about global warming and the summer of 2012.

Below are maps of the Palmer Drought Index for the summer of 1934 (left)and for June 30, 2012 (most recent available).

Please click to enlarge.

Unfortunately, the color scheme is not the same, so you'll have to refer to each map's legend to compare them.

In order for 'global warming' to be the cause of this summer's heat and drought, there would have to have been no similar events with cooler world temperatures. That is not the case. As you can see, 1934 is worse than 2012. Below is a graph of world temperatures since 1900 and I have placed blue rectangles on the temperatures during the drought of 1934 and current world temperatures.

Courtesy: woodfortrees.org

The worse drought occurred with cooler temperatures!

Is it possible that the current relatively high plateau has some influence on the drought and heat? Yes. We just don't know because the climate models are not nearly good enough to tell us.

But the idea that the heatwave and drought were "caused" by global warming is absolute nonsense.