The California drought just keeps getting worse — and that may not change anytime soon because of climate change.

A new study that was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is the first to quantify just how much of the drought that is currently ravaging the Sunshine State is being caused by Global Warming, and it’s come to a rather alarming conclusion: between 8 and 27 percent of the severity can be blamed on climate change, with the most likely figure in the 15 to 20 percent range, according to a Christian Science Monitor report.

The scientific community has long linked climate change to a growing incidence of droughts, but no one had actually quantified the effects of increasing greenhouse gas emissions on the overall moisture level. This study is the first to put real numbers on the phenomenon, as researchers at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory combed through data over the past 100-plus years to spot trends.

The reality is that it’s not just the lack of rainfall that’s causing the drought, it’s also the higher temperatures, which cause the water to evaporate and reduce the baseline amount of available water, a double whammy that is packing quite a punch in California, said Park Williams, the bioclimatologist who led the study, according to the report.

But what does that mean for the future of California? Not good things, Williams said. The study examined the consequences of climate change over the next few decades as temperatures continue to rise, drawing moisture out of the Earth and leaving dry ground behind. If anything, Californians may see more of this in the future: more wildfires, more dry riverbeds, and less groundwater. The East Coast has been spared from the worst of Global Warming, but California has been hit hard and will continue to be hit hard by these problems, the study found.

The research team examined data between 1901 and 2014 to track precipitation and temperature levels month to month. They found an average temperature rise of 2.5 degrees in the past 114 years, about on par with fossil fuel emissions over that period. Last year was the worst drought season on record, a consequence of dropping rainfall levels in 2012 and moisture evaporation.