Anthony Watts claims a scientist ignored his own work on US droughts

Anthony Watts latest claim (archived here, latest here) is that a scientist ignored his own research. At Anthony's climate conspiracy blog today, he copied and pasted a press release about a new paper on the Californian drought. Anthony wrote his article under the headline "Ridiculous claim from Columbia University: ‘Warming climate is deepening California drought". He thinks that it's ridiculous to think that evaporation will be higher under hotter conditions. He doesn't understand the basics of science at all. He also wrote:

From the THE EARTH INSTITUTE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY and the department of “intense droughts only occur in the age of the SUV” department, where they apparently failed to take the climatic history of the region into account:

And he put up a chart that he claimed came from from one of the authors of the new paper (though Anthony clearly didn't know that), in an attempt to dismiss this new work. In any case, it didn't. His graphic wasn't in the 2007 paper and the graphic didn't refute the new paper: