Abrupt shift to hotter and drier climate over inner East Asia beyond the tipping point

• DOI: 10.1126/science.abb3368
• Publication Date: 2020-11-27T00:10:16Z
• Authors: Peng Zhang; Jee-Hoon Jeong; Jin-Ho Yoon; Hyungjun Kim; S.-Y. Simon Wang; Hans W. Linderholm; Keyan Fang; Xiuchen Wu; Deliang Chen
• Keywords: 13. Climate action; 11. Sustainability; 15. Life on land; 01 natural sciences; 6. Clean water; 0105 earth and related environmental sciences

A dangerous trend

How anthropogenically driven climate change is affecting heat waves and drought is one of the most important environmental issues facing societies around the globe. Zhang et al. present a 260-year-long record of temperature and soil moisture over inner East Asia that reveals an abrupt shift to hotter and drier conditions (see the Perspective by Zhang and Fang). Extreme episodes of hotter and drier climate over the past 20 years, which are unprecedented in the earlier records, are caused by a positive feedback loop between soil moisture deficits and surface warming and potentially represent the start of an irreversible trend.

Science , this issue p. 1095 ; see also p. 1037