Gore correct on Florida drought levels, but they’re not too unusual

Criticizing President Donald Trump’s “reckless” decision to pull out of the Paris climate change agreement, Former Vice President Al Gore said evidence abounds that climate change is real, and people “don’t have to rely on the virtually unanimous opinion of the scientific community anymore.”

“Mother Nature is telling us every night on the TV news now is like a nature hike through the book of Revelation,” Gore said on “Fox News Sunday” on June 4. “We’ve had 11 once-ina-thousand-year downpours in the U.S. just in the last 10 years. We’ve got these wildfires that become mega fires now. Seventy percent of Florida is in drought today.”

Gore correctly cited a drought figure for Florida from the United States Drought Monitor, a weekly map published on Thursdays showing drought conditions. The monitor, established in 1999, is produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It is based on measurements of climatic, hydrologic and soil conditions as well as observations from more than 350 contributors around the country.

It showed 71.66 percent of Florida was in a moderate to extreme drought as of May 30. (The previous few weeks it had been between 65 and 66 percent.) This week’s map showed the drought had grown, to 76.4 percent of the state.

While that’s the highest this year, it has reached similarly high levels many times since 2000.

The last time the drought monitor showed Florida’s area of drought as high as 71 percent was February 2013. During two weeks in April 2012, 99.96 percent of Florida was in a drought. More than 72 percent of Florida was in a drought between late January and early June 2012..

Florida’s dry season normally runs from about November through May but a period of drought can run into summer, said Victor Murphy, climate service program manager for NOAA’s National Weather Service-Southern Region.

There is a small bit of good news: “Since the Florida wet season has returned with a vengeance over the past week, and is forecast to continue over the next few weeks, the amount of Florida in drought two to four weeks from now should be substantially less than what it is today,” Murphy said Monday.

“It’s part of the climate — part of natural cycles,” said David Zierden, the state climatologist for Florida. “Our current drought is no worse or more prolonged than any other drought we go through periodically.”

While Gore’s numerical statement about the drought is correct, David Nolan, who chairs the University of Miami’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, cautioned against pointing to any particular weather event as proof of climate change.

“I am generally not comfortable with relating any local event, a drought in one place or a flood in another, to global warming,” Nolan said. “What matters most is global average temperature, because that drives sea level rise, which eventually will be the biggest problem.”

Our ruling

Gore correctly cited the United States Drought Monitor which showed that 71.66 percent of Florida was experiencing a drought for the week ending May 30 (and 76.4 percent this week). However, that drought percentage isn’t unheard of in Florida.

We rate this claim Mostly True.

— Al Gore on June 4 in an interview on “Fox News Sunday” “70 percent of Florida is in drought today.”