The devastating drought that has been ravaging the eastern region of the Mediterranean Levant from 1998 triggering an inevitable Syrian civil war, which is also the the worst climate change event in the last 900 years.

In this new NASA study, scientists were able to analyze existing computer models that can provide better simulations of climate change and its effects. Scientists were also able to trace back the history of drought by investigating tree ring records that revealed the annual precipitation record of recent years, all the way back to the 1100s.

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This drought can now be experienced by those in Southern Europe, North Africa all across to the Middle East, specifically in the Levant region. The Levant region covers Israel, Cyprus, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Turkey and Syria.

According to climate scientist, Ben Cook of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the magnitude and the significance of human caused climate change is now requiring us to fully understand the entire range of the natural climate variability. He adds, recent events show anomalies from the outside range of natural variability, which can be linked to a particular event or a series of events which have been caused by some sort of human caused climate change factor.

The driest years have been determined by scientists using geographical distribution of these droughts, from crucial data in order to identify the causes for these dry years in a specific region. This data can also provide important information starting from natural variations of drought that can be distinguished from human caused ones, which are made worse by global warming.

In this new study, the region's drought that occurred from 1998 to 2012 has been longer than usual, which is also 50 percent drier than the driest season in the last 500 years. It is also 10 to 20 percent more dry that the worst drought ever since 1100.

Warming temperatures can cause drought, leading to disruption in food producing systems to spread in a larger scale. This can also lead to potential conflict in water resources. These new findings are detailed and published in the online Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres.