Climate change is making droughts worse, say scientists and journalists. The atmosphere’s growing “thirst” has “made droughts 40% more severe across the globe,” said the University of Oxford in 2025, referring to a paper published in Nature, which the New York Times and many others covered. “From 2018 to 2022, the global land area experiencing drought rose by 74%,” said the lead author, Solomon Gebrechorkos.
Others had calculated similar numbers. “Human-driven climate change is leading to a permanent state of increased dryness on 77.6% of the Earth’s land masses,” reported Time in 2024, a figure computed by dividing rain by a temperature-based estimate of the air’s thirst. “Confirmed: Global floods, droughts worsening with warming,” said an Associated Press headline in 2023. “The landmasses of the planet are drying,” said ProPublica in July 2025.
But the rain gauges that measure drought directly show no substantial global change in at least 120 years. “Meteorological droughts do not show any substantial changes at the global scale in at least the last 120 years,” noted a 2022 review by Sergio Vicente-Serrano, a Spanish climatologist.
A meteorological drought is a drought measured by rainfall. The same review said an increase in the severity of agricultural and ecological droughts “seems to emerge as a consequence of the increase in the severity of AED,” the air’s demand for water, which is a calculation rather than a measurement.
In western Europe, this year’s dry spring showed no climate signal in the rain, “suggesting that climate change did not play a role in the meteorological drought at the regional scale,” said a July report from World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists who put numbers on climate change’s share of the blame for weather disasters. The same report said such highly evaporative conditions “have become about 80 times more likely” and such a soil drought “about 5 times more likely.”
The worst drought year in the American West in a thousand years came in 1934, when the air held 308 parts per million of carbon dioxide, just a fifth of the way from the pre-industrial 280 to today’s 428. During that year, “over 70% of western North America experienced extreme drought,” said a 2014 paper, which blamed a stuck ridge of high pressure, possibly amplified by dust blowing off plowed fields
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been blunt about this reality. “There is low confidence in the emergence of drought frequency in observations, for any type of drought, in all regions,” the IPCC concluded in its 2021 assessment of the science.
