Manmade climate change could be worsening California's drought, which has been hurting the state in more ways than one.
According to The Los Angeles Times, authors of a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters stated human-caused climate change could have worsened California's drought by a factor between eight percent and 27 percent.
"A lot of people think that the amount of rain that falls out the sky is the only thing that matters," study lead author A. Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said in a press release. "But warming changes the baseline amount of water that's available to us, because it sends water back into the sky."
Through projections based on their findings, the researchers believe drought-like conditions could even become permanent by the 2060s, The Times reported.
Researchers at the University of California - Davis (UCD) also tried to quantify how the drought is affecting the state's economy through the agriculture industry. The researchers estimated the agriculture industry in California will see more than 10,000 jobs eliminated and will lose a bout $1.84 billion in 2015.
Said Jay Lund, director of the UCD Center for Watershed Sciences in a press release, "The transition will cause some increased fallowing of cropland or longer crop rotations but will help preserve California's ability to support more profitable permanent and vegetable crops during drought."
