Major Research Paper 'Proving' Climate Change Induces Longer Droughts Withdrawn

A major research paper that claimed to provide proof climate change was causing more-severe and -frequent droughts has been withdrawn by its publisher, the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

Nature published the study, “Warming accelerates global drought severity,” in June 2025. The authors claimed to find droughts on Earth have become more severe and intense since 1981. They stated specifically that climate change had made the atmosphere “thirst[ier],” resulting in droughts from 2018 to 2022 that were 40 percent more severe than in the 37 years prior, with the area affected by drought increasing by 74 percent, 58 percent of which they blamed on the increased “thirst of the atmosphere” they attributed to human-caused climate change.

In addition to receiving widespread media coverage, the paper was cited 337 times in other studies referencing climate change causing greater drought, in just over a year, by the time the report’s authors had to retract it.

Critics of the study pointed out significant errors in the data and calculations used in the study. Nature’s retraction notice acknowledges these and other errors:

The authors have retracted this article after being notified of errors in the paper and independently identifying further issues. First, area-weighted grid cells were not used when calculating study-wide averages, an error that affected numerical values in the main text, Fig. 1b, and Extended Data Figs. 4 and 8. Second, results based on GLEAM v3 instead of GLEAM4 were inadvertently used in Extended Data Fig. 4: the two datasets are largely consistent for 1981–2021, but the area weighting based on GLEAM4 resulted in a reduced drought-affected area in 2022. Third, the underlying code included a timestepping error in the computation of regional drought-affected areas, meaning that dates were not properly parsed when subsetting the data for the 1981–2017 and 2018–2022 periods. This misclassification of time steps affected the regional averages in Extended Data Fig. 8h. Finally, it was not clearly explained how masking was applied in calculations. … Although the authors are willing to correct and clarify the above matters, given the scope of the necessary corrections and the need for additional revision and peer review, the authors have decided to retract the paper and to resubmit a fully revised and corrected version for peer review. All authors agree with the retraction.