When you think about just how dry Arizona, the rest of the Southwest and California have been for more than a decade, does it seem possible that it’s being caused by unusually strong winds?

What if those same winds were also limiting the effects of global warming?

That’s what Thomas Delworth, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, N.J. proposed in research presented at the Meteorological Society’s annual meeting in Phoenix this week.