Western US faces medieval-level drought period

The West is on track to endure its worst droughts in recorded history. Research published in the journal Science last year found that droughts in the 21st century caused in part by anthropogenic warming (i.e. human-caused climate change) have reached medieval proportions — literally. The data suggested that the Western United States has suffered, and will likely continue to suffer, megadroughts (droughts that last years or even decades) on par with an extremely dry period between ~850 and 1600 CE. This year, those predictions appear to be coming true. The…