For 25 years, the U.S. Drought Monitor has significantly exaggerated drought conditions in California, providing state officials with the pretext for a range of climate-change policies that have crippled the state’s water infrastructure, devastated farming, and punished its 39 million residents with skyrocketing water bills.
That’s the conclusion of Statistical Review of United States Drought Monitor, a landmark California Policy Center study published today by researchers Edward Ring and Marc Joffe.
USDM is a federally funded team of researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Between the time it began issuing drought designations in 2000 through late 2025, the group has concluded that California has been under drought conditions roughly 61 percent of the time — a remarkable doubling of the drought rate in the previous 100 years.
That would be alarming if it were true. But using USDM’s own methodology, Ring and Joffe were unable to replicate USDM’s dramatic findings, and instead found drought conditions should have been designated only about 31 percent of the time using USDM’s framework. In their own independent analysis, the pair found that recent climate conditions are not significantly drier than those that prevailed during much of the 20th century.
CPC’s findings call into question the accuracy of the USDM and its outsized role in shaping California water policy, as well as potential methodological or institutional bias in its approach.
Makes you wonder about the climate change scam doesn’t it?