The Sonora, Chihuahua, and Jornada deserts of the American southwest have expanded across the United States.

The most obvious result of this expanding desertification is a crash in worldwide populations of amphibians.

Temperatures have not changed as global warming increased. Instead, weather patterns have moved our deserts.

Weather patterns are controlled by changes in atmospheric pressure. Since temperature changes can trigger these pressure changes, scientists have relied solely on temperature when making their climate models. But a few years ago a group of physicists proposed another mechanism for changes in atmospheric pressure: a change in the number of gas molecules in the air.

Koch funded research confirmed global warming is a real phenomenon after the opening of the Northwest Passage made that blatantly obvious.

One change that the United States must consider is the expansion of water redistribution and irrigation like Mexico, which expanded irrigation to combat desertification.

Our ocean hold 99% more heat than our air, and the ocean is mostly unmonitored. Hotter ocean surfaces are producing more evaporation that is moving climate patterns northward.

Such a conclusion could lead to major revisions of the climate model as well as new perspectives on how people impact it. If condensation is as important as their results suggest, deforestation and a drying climate could have a much more significant impact on our planet than previous climate studies have suggested. But this round of results, like the one before it, are still being debated.

Most southeast United States rainfall is produced by equatorial monsoon rainfall redistributed northward by the Gulf of Mexico. Our remaining rainfall is produced by the Rocky Mountains, which pulls monsoon rainfall southward from Canada.

"Tornado alley" is where these air masses collide over North America.

Rainfall over the United States has declined as these weather patterns have shifted northward, expanding desert conditions across most of the country and producing devastating tornadoes across states where this has been rare, like Massachusetts.